World of Ashes (34 page)

             
“It wasn’t like that.” Ethan let his focus go a thousand yards. He wasn’t angry at her, but at how facts had gotten distorted with so few people to distort them. “These poor bastards, Bloods though they might have been, rolled up on a pile of Zims we’d been stacking all night, a fresh wave of them from a fallen checkpoint. Their Cadillac Escalade - that burned out looking hulk on the side of the road you’ve seen-” Mary nodded, she’d seen it. “Got stuck on the rotting bodies with those stupid twenty four inch rims… Sure, they shot at us first, but we got to them without firing a shot. We went down there trying to help them. I didn’t even know Allen then, but his brother had been in the Army and used to teach him and their younger brother what he knew, so Allen got in the turret with the M240… And things were going good, they were calming down and cooperating. There were seven of them.” Ethan swallowed hard, “One deputy put down a Zim that was about to bite him, I think, and I guess these people had had such a rough time of it out there that they panicked and shot at us again.” He didn’t have to go any farther with the story. Mary already know Allen had turned them all into hamburger in a matter of seconds. She also understood that it was probably because of this incident that Keith and Ethan treated a boy almost ten years younger than them like an equal. There was no more childhood for Allen Broadwick or the children of his generation. They were arguably robbed the worst of any generation. To just barely begin to know a world and have it end before you can truly join it would be like building a home, and then the day before you moved in it burns to the ground.

             
“And then yesterday… It was just like being there again.” Ethan broke down some, his composure slipping.

             
“Yesterday was nothing like the Bloods.” Mary put her hand on Ethan’s arm. Her hand was warm and soft, Ethan was almost surprised how warm. “In a way those people might have been innocent, scared of everyone and wanted by no one. Their reaction might almost be forgivable, in time, but the other day the worst of humanity butted heads with the best of it and
lost
. I don’t care how many of them you had to kill, or how many you went to school with, or how many were your best friends. When they chose to try to stone Tammy and Sabrina to death like this was the ‘Stan, regardless of the reason, they crossed a line we can’t let ourselves be on the wrong side of. You’ve never forgotten who we really are, or what it means to crown thy good with brotherhood…” Mary laughed. “I’m not a poet, I swear, but it really fits.”

             
“Yeah… I wonder if a jury will see it that way.” Ethan gripped Mary’s hand.

             
“Ethan, c’mon, there’s not going to be a trial.”

             
“How do you know? Just because they were fanatics doesn’t mean they don’t have friends in the community. Hell, one of them was the head honcho of security at the trading post.” Ethan didn’t seem to want to believe he wouldn’t be crucified for the event. If the dead hadn’t wiped out most of the living, he probably would have.

             
Mary smiled and leaned back in her chair. “There’s not going to be a trial, Ethan. I know because I made sure there wouldn’t be.”

             
“What did you do, put a gun to someone’s head?” Ethan laughed.

             
“Mayor Kenly’s, actually.”

             
“You didn’t.” Ethan sat straight up. Though he barely knew Mary, he well understood she wouldn’t have had a second’s pause about doing something like that.

             
“Well, the gun never left my holster, but yes. I strongly implied the that I could not raise this child on my own, and if he was going to do anything short of reinstate you after we toss those Dark Age throwbacks out of town I’d shoot him in his sleep.” Mary’s icy blue/green eyes betrayed no sense of falsehood to her statement. Of course, Ethan would have to fact check, but he didn’t expect to be disappointed.

             
Before Ethan drifted off to sleep again when the next course of pain meds was delivered, he asked Mary something that had been bothering him. “If we weren’t already having a child… I mean, like if things were the way they were before… Would you even give me a second glance?”

             
“Nope.” Mary smiled, answering much quicker than Ethan had expected. “My normal type was the ‘Shallow Hal.’ You know, the type that only cared how my ass looked, was habitually broke, usually cheating or doing stupid shit in general. Real assholes. I would have put you in the friend zone so damn quick. Probably would even have asked to borrow money just days after payday.”

             
“Uh… Thanks?”

             
Mary laughed at herself, and at the look on Ethan’s face. “Look, Ethan, you can stop questioning my motives anytime now. I had my way with you in a hotel room because we both needed it. You needed someone besides yourself to care about as much as I needed someone to care about me, and that was the only way I thought I could show you...” Mary put her head in Ethan’s lap. “Life is extremely nigh these days. As if the Apoc’ hadn’t already taught us that. Surviving the Plague made me feel invincible, but now… I know I haven’t lived my life the way I should. Relationships with morons, running away to the Marines to escape my completely reasonable middle class parents and our stiflingly perfect and normal home all just before the Panic…” For the first time Mary actually seemed upset. She’d seen the blood and guts of her closest friends and barely said a word. How much more could she take, how much more was bottled inside, left unsaid? An entire generation of people who may never be able to put a voice to the horror of watching their world fall to the undead was only just beginning. Grabbing Mary out of her chair Ethan pulled her into the bed with him. She lost all composure. She cried for over an hour, but never said a word. They fell asleep together and waited for the dawn.

              Though he was ordered to stay away, Ethan found himself unable to be elsewhere when the sixty four remaining members of the Church of the Old Testament were escorted out of town by the Cavalry. It was understood this wasn’t the law, or the government attacking religion, but the other way around. Almost everyone in town claimed some denomination of Christianity, yet no one protested the expulsion of the extremist church that had started a riot on Main Street and nearly killed two innocent women and as many lawmen. They were loaded into the back of a number of pickup trucks from the massive lot of abandoned vehicles refugees had dumped in almost every field outside the airport, and driven out of sight down Westbound 44.

             
“What’s the likelihood they’ll be back?” Mary said mostly to herself, leaning on Ethan’s shoulders from the top of the Ten Million Dollar Bridge to Nowhere (a bridge the town had built with Stimulus money a few years back that literally led to nowhere. It was pretty to look at though.) He could see through the railing on the bridge as the trucks were driven away, a Humvee escorting from the front and rear, that this was a morally absent thing to do. Expelling trouble makers from one group or another was a time honored human tradition, but this time expulsion without anything but a few pistols and hunting rifles was undoubtedly a death sentence.

“It’s a certainty.” Ken
ly grumbled, hawking a massive wad of snot onto the ground. A flu was making its rounds of the town, so far they had plenty of meds, but it was taking its toll on productivity and emergency stores. “They all but promised it the day we arrested them.”

“Don’t be so sure,
Sir. Those are the registered members. A lot of folks are sympathizers. They have friends and business ties all over town. This is a shit-storm that won’t go away any time soon.” Lee leaned against the railing of the bridge they stood on. “We downloaded and took a look at those pictures you and the pilots took in Hillsboro, Ethan.”

             
Ethan looked up at Lee, a view he wasn’t used to. “And?”

             
“I’ve been on the radio with the CO at Labadie, Major Donovan. He says he can’t spare the Marines because they’re dealing with gang threats to the North West. However, he agrees that whoever this is, they’re a real threat.” Kenly’s sausage fingers wrapped white knuckled around the bars of the fence, listening to the stupidity Major Donovan spewed out repeated by Lee. “We’ve been ‘
given clearance’
to deal with it.”

             
“Since when did we start taking orders from Texas? Or asking their permission.” Keith narrowed his eyes. “This is a slippery slope, Lee.”

             
“Brewer, shut the fuck up.” Kenly adjusted his belt as the convoy disappeared over a hill. “We didn’t ask their permission for shit. I said we are going to take these sadistic fuckers out, and I only asked if they would come along. And last time I checked, they’re as close to a government as this land has, save us, so it would behoove us to cooperate- in my humble opinion. Not to mention they supply our power and, I think, would come to our defense if threatened by a force we couldn’t deal with.”

             
“Forgive me if I find your faith misplaced.” Ethan stood, albeit slowly, and stretched. “Granted, Texas kept its shit together when the federal government couldn’t, but that doesn’t mean they don’t suffer from the same pointless, strangling bureaucracy that crippled our nation for almost two decades before the first signs of the plague ever started. We could be trading random gangs for an empire.”

“Texas has upheld the Constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights
.” Mary interrupted. “We might be taking a hard stance on dissidents right now, but Texas isn’t the bad guy here.” Ethan noticed that she still referred to the Texans as “we”, although he was guilty of the same thing when speaking of the few happy memories he had from the Army. “So this one time,
we
all…” began almost every story.

             
“So what now?” Keith asked. Someone had to.

             
“Let’s do something positive for a change.” Ethan would get to the murders, but after he’d recovered. Until then, and without television, he’d have to find something to occupy his time. “Maybe we should draft a new Constitution for the town, like a State’s Constitution, not something that replaces, but adds to the real one that is relevant in the here and now.”

             
“Absolutely. I’m thinking
pure let it be
stance on everything from Economics to Adam marrying Steve.” Kenly stopped at the corner at the bottom of the bridge as the group began to separate. “I know this is a real stretch into an uncertain future, but if the dead keep rotting they vast majority of them will be too decayed to function by this time next year. If we really are the only town left in Missouri then the state belongs to us. We’re the stewards, we’re the law of the land. Let’s do it right this time.”

             
“That is pretty damned bold.” Keith folded his arms. “How do you plan to govern the land from here, Mr. Mayor, or should I say Governor?”

             
“I don’t.” Kenly chuckled. “Hell, according the radio there’s less than a billion people left on Earth. That means there is so much land out there that people could potentially go their entire lives now and never see another person if they really wanted to. Sure there needs to be law, otherwise there is no civilization, but it needs to be humanistic law. Not laws created to serve the special interest groups. What I’m getting at is if I want to take my kid to McDonalds and buy his fat ass a happy meal, I will, and no moron liberal progressive is gonna tell me I can’t do that because it’ll make him fat. No more nonsense like the Fairness Doctrine, or Cap & Tax or ObamaCare. If it’s not good for America at a casual glance it doesn’t happen.” Kenly puffed the stogie, his throat drying a little.

“And please,
Ethan, don’t even comment on the fallout from the Affordable Care Act causing the zombie virus. We don’t care where it came from because there’s nothing we can do about it now, and that guy on the radio is probably just as crazy as you are - Mexicans making bad batches of drugs to meet the US demand for prescription pharmaceuticals after the Healthcare System collapsed- doesn’t explain why the dead walk. Sorry, the theory is too thin.” Keith shut Ethan up before he could get started, mocking the entire theory.

Ethan burst into uproarious laughter. “Time
will be the judge of that one.”

              “Speaking of medications…” Kenly tossed the stub of his cigar on the ground and stomped it out. “I’m not sure how I’m going to explain away your deputy growing pot, even if it’s for medication.”

             
“And fuel and plastic and rope and-” Ethan could tell he was supposed to shut up, he just didn’t care. It was his fondest wish to be fired.

             
“We’re short on everything, Sir.” Keith came to Ethan’s defense. Keith was scientifically minded enough to understand marijuana’s medicinal properties, and realistic enough to know people were going to fight it. “We barely recognize any of the laws from before, and we especially don’t when it’s outside our walls and jurisdiction, so pretending to keep up with an already abominably failed War on Drugs makes
oodles
of no sense. Sure, we gotta keep people educated about, and off, the hard drugs, but then most of those types of people Ethan’s already run out of town. Now we’re stuck with a law abiding citizenry that needs medical relief and needs it fast. Marijuana actually solves a lot of those problems. Also, I was a major pothead in high school and I just refuse to pretend it’s even half as destructive as alcohol. If we’re gonna ban anything, it ought to be alcohol and tobacco!” Keith was almost laughing, but managed to control himself as several Cavalrymen passed by. He was supposed to maintain the appearance of gentile behavior if he was gonna draw Captain’s rations. “The doctors and nurses can help culture penicillin. We’re actually working on that already. And to be truthful, there is no reason we can’t use capsulated, concentrated THC as a pain reliever. We’re just going to have to play this close to the chest and try not to give our political enemies any more ammunition than we already have.”