Ash: Rise of the Republic (3 page)

I loaded up all the magazines we had, locked
up all the spare ammunition in the safe, and starting cleaning my
weapons. Once I had thoroughly gone through each gun with patches
and Q-tips and powder solvent, the women came out of the spare room
wiping tears from their eyes. I made Deb put her holster on and
told her to carry her pistol at all times. I loaded the twelve
gauge with 00 buckshot and handed it to the girl, who was calm and
reserved now. She had come shooting with us years before and had
fired that same shotgun, but I made sure to go through the gun
safety stuff again. She settled in to the couch with a death grip
on her new weapon. I almost felt sorry for the next guy who thought
about coming after her with his dick out.

I wanted to check on the neighbors, so I
decided to get some gear together to keep the ash out. I know you
kids bitch about them, but in those early days I would have killed
for one of these new ash suits. The best I could come up with that
first night was a painter’s respirator, a dive mask, and my rain
gear. It did the job, but that shit clung to the material so badly
that Deb eventually set up a sort of air-lock around each of the
outer doors to keep us from tracking it everywhere. Anyway, I
donned my makeshift suit and shuffled through the drifts on the
front porch and out into the swirling night.

We lived in a relatively secluded
neighborhood, well out in the country. It was a small development,
only about twenty houses on acre lots. They were all mid-sized,
three to four bedroom, fairly new homes with plenty of space
between them. There was a single street, a soft cornered square
ring road with houses inside and out. The neighborhood was bordered
on two sides by country highways, and there was a short outlet
street that connected the circle with each of them. The lots that
backed up to the highways were bordered with an 8 foot stone wall.
The rest of the perimeter was tangled yaupon thicket. Our house was
in the furthest corner from the main roads, backed up to a dense
wooded area with unused pastureland beyond. The people living out
there were a mixture of oilfield workers and upper-middle class
white collars working mostly for the university. Backgrounds were
mixed, but everyone got along. It was a mostly quiet, relaxed,
country place to live.

Walking out to the street, I headed to my
left-hand neighbor first. They were a couple about our age with a
toddler, Mike and Jackie, our closest friends in the neighborhood.
We had passed many a drunken night in their driveway playing
washers and eating barbeque. I knew them to be fairly competent and
self-sufficient, but I felt it was my neighborly duty to make sure
they were set up for the storm. Mike answered the door and
immediately started laughing at my get-up. I was confused at first,
I had settled into a serious and somber mood since the events at
the store and it took me a minute to recognize what I must look
like with my respirator and dive mask. I shrugged it off and
laughed with him for a minute, sheepishly removing my gear as I
walked in the front door. He offered me a cold beer and I eagerly
accepted, suddenly realizing how thirsty I was. He was reasonably
well provisioned with food and other supplies, having gone to the
store as soon as he saw the pillar. I let him know about the huge
stock of goods we had lucked into and discussed the dangers of
inhaling the ash. He said he had some paper masks in the garage
that they could use if they needed to venture out. He suggested we
arrange a neighborhood meeting for the morning. He promised to
canvas the left half of the subdivision once he had thrown together
some protective clothing. Beer finished, I left him and headed out
to spread the word to the houses to the right.

After an hour, I had spoken to everyone I
could find and decided to head back home. Of the ten neighbors I
had visited, only six had answered the door. I spread the word
about the ash and the meeting in the morning. Most seemed at least
temporarily well supplied. I trudged back thinking about the empty
houses, hoping their occupants weren’t trying to buy food at
Walmart a few hours back. They might still be there.

Once I reached the house I ran into Mike
coming back from his slog up the left side of the street. I
couldn’t resist poking a little fun at the suit he had come up
with: pink child’s swim goggles, a paper respirator, and a yellow
slicker. He flicked me off and told me he would see me in the
morning. I headed inside to find the women beginning to inventory
our haul. I dove in and started counting cans and toilet paper.
After two hours we had a huge spreadsheet compiled, listing
essentially everything we had on hand. I made sure to print it out;
there was no way to know how long the power would last. After a
quick meal, I armed the security system and we all turned in.
Outside, the ash kept coming down.

Chapter 2

May, 31 PC (2046 AD)

*

“
The rangers were the first line
of defense; ruthless men and women, barely more than criminals
themselves, riding through the dust to bring brutal justice to
brutal men.”

-Daniel Galloway, ‘Risen From The Ash: A History of
the Republic’; RNT University Press, 50 PC (2065 AD);

*

Captain Grover B. McLelland, commanding officer of
the 1st New Texas Rangers, paused to take a long swig. He had
requisitioned the rotgut whiskey from the three outlaws they had
hanged that morning. The fiery liquid was foul, but it was better
than nothing.

In a gravelly whisper, he continued, “We’ll
leave it there for tonight kiddos. I think everyone is finished
cleaning, bring your weapons up for inspection and then get some
rest. I want to make it all the way to the beltway tomorrow.”

One by one, McLelland’s young ranger troop
brought him their freshly cleaned and oiled rifles. He was stern
with them, pointing out bits of ash they had missed in the dim
candlelight, but he was secretly proud at their attention to
detail. The new ashcovers were working as well as could be
expected, but nothing keeps a bolt moving smoother than good old
fashioned elbow grease. There were only a few jams during the
firefight earlier that day. He had seen much worse; plenty of men
and women under his command had died simply because they were too
lazy to take a rag to their weapons before hitting the sack.

“Just remember,” he said as the last one
headed to her pallet, “bullets won’t do you any good if your rifle
can’t cycle. There are plenty of outlaws that can split you from
groin to gullet before you can even reach for your knife. Most of
them have been running wild longer than y’all have been alive. They
know their knives won’t jam up with ash. Better to put two in the
chest and one in the head and keep moving than to sit there pulling
on your charging handle while your guts spill out. Sweet
dreams.”

He sipped the last of the raw whiskey as the
first snores drifted across the room. His troop was young; the boy
snoring peacefully nearest him was just barely sixteen. Just six
months ago the Governor’s office had sent him these kids as
replacements after his old troop was annihilated in a single
disastrous night. The veterans had been crushed when the roof of
their barracks collapsed after a heavy ashfall. The Captain and his
wife had been away on some well-deserved leave at the time. When he
had heard the sad news, he had tracked down the engineer in charge
of clearing structures for safe use and beat him bloody with length
of steel pipe. The engineer was a popular man, and the savage
assault had earned the Captain some powerful enemies within the
Republic bureaucracy. He had almost been stripped of his command,
but the Governor had stepped in. The RNT had an outlaw problem, and
McLelland knew better than most how to solve an outlaw problem.
Unable to get rid of him, his enemies tried to set him up for
failure by sending him a pack of raw children. It was widely
assumed that they would be slaughtered within a week. The kids were
part of a group slotted for service in the government construction
and maintenance crews. They were mostly orphans, all volunteers;
teenagers with no futures and little to lose. When they had
reported for duty, malnourished and untrained, the Captain had been
furious. His complaints to the War Department fell on deaf ears,
however, and he was left with little choice but to whip the
youngsters into fighting shape as fast as he could.

For six grueling months he had done just
that. He had molded them into a crack team of cutthroats and
trackers. A team that now drifted off to sleep on the cold floor of
an abandoned bank on the outskirts of what used to be Houston. They
had proven themselves in more than a dozen engagements while
suffering only light casualties. He was fiercely proud of his new
outfit, and treated each of them as his own child.

Stretching sore limbs and arthritic joints,
he stowed his glass and slowly stood up to inspect the pickets.
They had been lucky to find a place so suitable for their quick
bivouac. Most single-story structures were largely buried in the
drifts of ash that had accumulated over the past thirty years.
Usually only the top few feet of a single story building was still
visible, making entrance difficult. This bank happened to have a
hatch in the roof, with a ladder leading down into a back room. The
troop could rest peacefully with minimal sentry duty for once. The
last week of travel had found them sleeping in the open most
nights, they all welcomed a chance to feel secure from bandits and
beasts.

The hatch creaked softly as he slowly pushed
it open, and bitter cold washed down on him. He climbed out into a
starless, cloudy night. The darkness was thick and palpable; the
low clouds seemed to reflect the tiniest noise. He pulled his mask
off to fill his lungs with crisp air, there was little danger from
the ash in the still night.

“Have you been lying to the children again?”
The gentle voice drifted in from the shadows to his right. “They
don’t need to hear about those hard days. They’ve got enough of
their own to deal with.”

He peered into the shadows, trying to make
out the shape of her. “Well I’m of the opinion that if they learn
what we had to go through then they might have a few more days
ahead of them, hard or not. As for me, I know I probably don’t have
many hard days left, and it just so happens it’s hard as can be
tonight!”

“You’re drunk, husband, go to bed. All’s
well up here, I’ll wake you for your watch.” Her tone made it clear
that the conversation was over.

“One day you’ll regret all the times you’ve
spurned me, foul woman!” He said with affection as he made his way
back down the ladder. He crept quietly back to the desk he had
commandeered and spread his map out in the candlelight. It was an
ancient, crumbling thing: a cheap folded roadmap of Texas that
could be had in any gas station before the pillar. He had used it
for years and it had been on the verge of falling apart when an old
friend in the map room at the University had offered to laminate it
for him a year ago.

He traced the route they had been following
for the past week: a stretch of old SH6 and US290, the most
important trade route in the fledgling Republic. He had been
instrumental in opening the route ten years before when he had
scouted for the expedition that established the Refinery colony.
The brave settlers he had escorted through the wastelands of
Houston had restored a portion of the machinery in the intervening
years and were currently pumping out several tankers of gasoline
and diesel every month. Fuel was the lifeblood of the re-emergence
of civilization, and this road was its artery. Recently, however,
there had been a rash of armed robbery in a seemingly random
pattern along the route. Guards had been hired for the convoys with
little result. The Governor had sent him and his troop of killers
out to put an end to it after the most recent tragedy. Ten days
ago, a tanker full to the brim with precious diesel was ambushed
and destroyed in the night.

They hadn’t found much at the crime scene
other than the smoking wreckage and the bodies of the guards. It
looked like the poor bastards hadn’t even had a chance to fire at
their attackers: all of their weapons were still charged with full
magazines. The tracks at the scene told of a large group of
attackers, perhaps as many as fifty. They had followed them
southeast until a heavy ashfall blew in from the north. When the
storm had finally settled, the trail was wiped clean. Now they were
heading east along the highway, hoping to stumble across new
sign.

The attack was a new puzzle for the grizzled
campaigner. The outlaws he had chased during his career had usually
been more interested in stealing things, especially something as
precious as fuel. The band they had run down earlier that day had
been well equipped, but they were scrawny and malnourished. Five
gallons of diesel could net a savvy negotiator a month’s worth of
provisions in any of the rough thieves’ dens that passed for
settlements in the region. The smoldering truck they had left two
days ago was hauling close to six thousand gallons of the priceless
fluid. He had yet to meet a starving man who would willingly burn
that kind of a fortune.

Satisfied with the possibility that the next
day might bring answers, he rolled up the map with a characteristic
grunt, pinched out the candle, and stretched out to get some rest
before his watch.

Four hours later, a soft nudge on his big
toe jolted him awake. He exploded out of his blankets, eyes wild,
bowie knife brandished. His wife Deb stood in front of him at a
safe distance with a mocking smile on her face, her short, curvy,
muscular frame silhouetted by the gentle candle light. Her silver
streaked, chestnut brown hair gleamed in a tight ponytail. A few
unruly tendrils had broken free and formed a golden halo in the
soft light, adding to her dangerous, wild beauty. Still smiling,
she waited for the fury in his eyes turn to recognition, and then
lust.