World of Ashes (21 page)

             
There was total silence after the buck smelled them and trotted away. Thankfully no new snow had fallen, though the clouds threatened to release the snow and ash sooner rather than later. The tracks led them in a large arching circle that occasionally backtracked to throw them off, though it didn’t work very well. The hunting party wound up less than a mile from the hospital after several hours. The tracks ended at a cheaply made home from the 1960s near a newer subdivision. There was no horse barn in the abandoned and boarded up house with waist high grass, but one could easily smell the manure no one had bothered to clean up. Smoke from a makeshift chimney was a clear sign someone lived there now.

             
Spreading out to lay cover fire Lee radioed in for reinforcements and in a matter of minutes two police vehicles full of deputies pulled up. This was a Police issue for now, not the Army’s problem. Lee and he men stood back, though if it came to a firefight Lee wouldn’t hesitate to level the house.

             
Pushing down the key on the mike Ethan spoke, inwardly psyched that this was his first big situation as the one in charge. “Attention. This is Sheriff Ethan J. Cally of the Sullivan Sheriff’s Department. The house is surrounded. Come out unarmed with your hands on top of your head. This is your only warning.”

             
He got a prompt answer in the form of someone sticking a shotgun out the window and pulling the trigger at random. Luckily, Lee knew this was just panic fire and restrained the men. No need to let the occupant(s) know how many men they faced.

             
“That’s not quite the answer I was looking for.” Ethan said over the open mike. “If you shoot at us again I’m not going to stop the Cavalry from burning that shithole down around you.”

             
Another gunshot rang out and Ethan radioed for Lee to let the occupants know just how well armed the authorities were. A moment later the M249 one of the soldiers had been carrying sawed the back door in half. It swung open and collapsed in a cloud of splinters. Everyone was sure this would be the end of the confrontation, because who wanted to go up against a machine gun? The answer to that was
Someone Who Also Has a Machine Gun
. The signature sound of the larger caliber M240B irrupted from another window. The tracers walked up the lawn directly to the car Ethan was standing next to and obliterated the vehicle in a plume of oily smoke and shards of flying metal. The tracer’s phosphorus ignited the fuel in the engine but failed to set the tank off. The patrol car made several strange sounds as the siren shorted out and the tires popped.

             
Mortified that his brother might have just been killed in front of him Lee let slip the dogs of war. While his men and the entire sheriff’s department took the house down by the foundation in a roaring cacophony of gunfire Lee scrambled to the burning vehicle. When he found Ethan his brother was taking cover behind a tree, frantically trying to reload his 1911 despite shaking fingers. Lee fell upon his brother and bear hugged him. As the house burned and exploded from whatever chemicals were inside Lee helped Ethan up and took him behind a waiting ambulance.

             
“You okay?” Lee finally asked, assessing his brother along with an EMT. Lee wasn’t the hugging/touchy type, but he damned near wanted to kiss his brother.

             
“Yeah, I think.” Ethan’s head was starting to clear from the adrenaline dump. “Should have seen that one coming.” He admitted as the chemical odor of a meth lab drifted past them. Sour, noxious, artificial. The smell didn’t exist in nature, but had been a permanent fixture of life in rural Missouri for decades.

             
There was some more shouting and Lee realized that there was still someone alive inside the house. Crawling on all fours, the badly burned man made it to the snow and collapsed while giving the cops the one finger salute. The fight was over.

             
That night the local paper, printed and stapled together in all its cheap glory, reported on the day’s happenings as the first big Law Enforcement/Hero story the new paper could cover. The headlines read, “HERO COP SAVES INFANT AND BUSTS METH LAB.” Ethan couldn’t believe the hero they were talking about was him. He hadn’t done anything but tackle a zombie and get one of the town’s police cruisers sent to the scrap heap. The doctors finally cleared Ethan from the hospital, as he had almost a hundred small cuts from flying glass and metal. Lieutenant Reynolds came to fetch him in order to question the burned man since he’d regained consciousness. He was on morphine, but was lucid when Ethan and Reynolds strolled into the room.

             
“My name is Sheriff Ethan Cally, and this is Lieutenant Reynolds of the original Sullivan Police Department. We have some questions for you, Mr. Cole.”

             
“How do you know my name?” The man asked.

             
“Because you still had your wallet in your back pocket, or what was left of those Daisy Dukes you were wearing. Never seen a fire blow someone’s pant-legs off before. Neat thing those pressure cookers.” Ethan grabbed a chair and sat down while Reynolds stayed standing by the door. “Old habits die hard, huh? Old habits like… pretending you’re Trevor Philips?”

             
“Who?” Mr. Cole asked, not catching the Grand Theft Auto: 5 reference.

             
“Nevermind. You were cooking methamphetamine, and from what we can tell, probably cutting heroin and cocaine too, but then again there isn’t much left of your house.
Your
house, by the way. Surprised you actually owned it.”

Cole didn’t respond but to say, “I have the right to remain silent.”

             
“Yes,” Ethan countered, “But do you have the capacity to do so? Did you think that in a well organized town like this we’d tolerate you cooking methamphetamines?”

             
“You don’t seem to have a problem with people smoking’ pot.” Cole responded.

             
“You’re right. I don’t. A lot of people still do, though. I for one can see it’s a necessary evil, as we’ll soon lack any other medication. However, Mr. Cole, Methamphetamine has absolutely no medicinal value, and is possibly one of the worst substances mankind has ever unleashed upon itself, next to Krokodil, but we don’t live in Russia. Bottom line, I won’t allow its destructive presence to rule my town.” Before Cole could move on Ethan pulled out a picture of the charred horse that had been found in the garage. “Is this your horse, Mr. Cole?” Again, no answer. “Well, I believe Un-Lucky here was your horse. That you rode said Un-Lucky to my house last night and plotted to assassinate anyone inside. I also believe that your method for trying to to kill me, or anyone living at my house, such as Captain Brewer’s infant daughter, by murdering Deputy Harper and sending his infected corpse into my house. Sound familiar?”

             
“I want a lawyer.”

             
Reynolds and Ethan laughed. “A lawyer? You can’t be serious. You’re not getting a lawyer.” It was a lie, a lawyer had already volunteered to defend those in trouble with the local law so long as he didn’t have to go back to building the fences. “We’re going to drag you out of here tomorrow and hang you from the AppleTree sign at dawn if you don’t tell me everything I want to know. Now.”

             
Cole remained silent.

             
Ethan went on. “Considering the zombie of Deputy Harper was within arm’s reach of eating my God Daughter, Serenity…” Ethan studied Cole’s face as he mentioned the infant. Who wouldn’t care about an infant? A sociopath. This man’s face was unreadable. “I think it’s remarkable anyone allowed you to live
this
long.” Ethan stood and patted Mr. Cole on the shoulder, knowing it was burned and would hurt terribly. “Now… We know, from evidence gathered after the fire was put out, that you are in possession of illegally acquired weaponry, and items affiliated with the gangs operating South of Bourbon. Tell me everything I want to know and I won’t hang you myself. Fuck me around and I’ll let Captain Brewer come here and let you know just how he feels about almost having to watch a zombie eat his two month old.”

             
Mr. Cole weighed his options for perhaps thirty seconds, then admitted he had been in Bourbon the night Ethan and Keith had killed the bikers for raping them women. He stated that one of the men had been his little brother, and that he wanted revenge. Mr. Cole admitted Deputy Harper had been a client of his, even before the end of the world, buying anything from synthetic pot after the ban to meth and black-tar heroin. While Harper was binging on meth after work, Cole had tied him to the tree next to the Cally’s house with the intention of infecting him with a zombie’s severed head and letting him loose to eat the Sheriff in his sleep. Revenge, that had been the only goal. Making a profit on the drug trade was just a side note apparently.

             
Not needing to hear anything more Ethan turned off the audio recorder Reynolds had handed him in the hallway left the man in his room. “What did you say to him?” Kenly asked, spitting Copenhagen into a cup. He’d been standing just outside the room.

             
“I promised him that if he talked I wouldn’t take him out and hang him myself. I never made any promises about what you’d do.” Ethan took his uniform top off and put his jacket liner on before putting the top back on over it and left without another word. He had a mess to clean up at home, and for once he was going to enjoy cleaning his house. The next morning when Ethan went to the Wal*Mart Trading Post to get a case of beer he saw an odd shadow on the pavement swinging from the AppleTree sign. He didn’t bother to look up.

That winter Mr. Cole was the only person to be hanged. It was publicly announced that the Police had been determined he’d acted alone, but everyone knew that the kind of operation Cole was running wasn’t something you did alone. The incident also prompted Paula to quit her job at the hospital and stay home with Serenity, but with a fully loaded handgun and extra magazines on an ugly old Army utility belt she wore religiously. A soccer mom with a Glock. Glockmom.

With life drudging on at
a monotonous pace of uneventful snow storms, snow shoveling, and even more snow storms, everyone was disappointed to find it didn’t start to warm in this new world until late March. A hundred thousand burning cities had a profound effect on the sky. More so than people had expected, a glimpse of the ash that had helped seal the extinction of the Dinosaurs made days short and nights long. Those who’d bought into Global Warming seemed more like Chicken Little now, their old concerns about the environment a distant memory compared to the wasteland around them. The Earth was settling into a new mini-ice age because of the ash, but no one would know that for sure for years to come. It was also obvious most crops were going to fail if they were sewn in open fields. More supplies from other towns would have to be gathered to supplement food stocks while indoor grows could be built. This meant people were “leaving the wire” every day. The Wire was an old military term that seemed oddly appropriate now as giant, twenty foot concrete barriers started encircling more and more of the town. These walls were slowly replacing the chain-link fence that had been the stop-gap between the Dead and the Living for only a short while. Naturally Lee’s Army, dubbed 1st Cavalry Company, was perfectly suited for the job of escorting civilian “Gatherers” into the nearby towns. Because they’d scouted the area, Allen and Ethan were asked to come along for the first mission to Washington after the majority of the ashen snow had melted in the spring. It was still cold, but hadn’t been below freezing in over a week.

             
On the way through the unit again encountered the cross dressing lunatic in Union, only he was a zombie now, and hadn’t been so for very long. There was a lot of blood starting from his groin and traveling down to his feet as he staggered toward the Soldiers walking in patrol formation. Lee halted the column and they took defensive positions. Some took out cameras. There was a bulletin board in a local bar for Most Entertaining Zombie caught on camera. First prize was free drinks for a day.

             
“That the crazy guy on your report?” Lee asked as Ethan drew his sidearm.

             
“Yeah.” Ethan had to speak louder, this conversation was for the entire company to hear. “Looks a little deader than before, but pink is definitely still his color.” Almost everyone laughed as Ethan put the man down without much ceremony. They followed the blood trail that had been dripping from the void a zombie had left in his groin and found where he’d fallen in the snow and died, reanimated after the rage phase, and then farther back where he’d staggered out of a house with blood spraying everywhere. Snow angels mixed with blood. Macabre but funny in a morbid sort of way.

The home he’d been squatting in was a
very expensive looking house on a hill not far from the spot where their aloof friend had died. A naked body-builder of a man, a zombie in the early stages of turning green and purple, was standing in a corner of one of the bedrooms, a hunk of flesh no one dared identify in its mouth. Since the zombie didn’t see them, they didn’t bother it. They just left and never told anyone what they found in that house.