Darker Days (As the Ash Fell Book 2) Read online

  With the rising sun, the rain began to fall again and the visibility worsened as the rain picked up. Clay didn’t feel like going out in it, but in all reality, it was a light drizzle compared to some of the storms they slogged through on the way up. It wasn’t even the cold that bothered him so much as the sticky film that covered his skin after the rain evaporated. Nobody knew for sure what it was—most people just assumed it had something to do with the ash—but it made for an unpleasant, itchy experience. One time, after an extended hike through a heavy downpour, Clay actually peeled it off his skin—much like a bored fourth grader with access to a bottle of Elmer’s glue.

  An hour passed and the man was still a no-show. Despite being a little disappointed, Clay’s stomach started to unknot. He had been so indecisive about the whole exchange that his thinking had become muddled and he second-guessed every decision. And when Clay’s judgment was impaired, he made mistakes; missing minute details that could be the difference between life and death.

  “All right, I’m calling it,” Clay began before he suddenly stopped talking. He held up the binoculars once again and saw a man come around the side of the mall, a small cow trailing behind him. Clay sighed. “Crap.”

  “What?” Geoff asked before helping himself to the binoculars. “Sweet! He’s here!”

  “Yeah,” Clay said, conflicted.

  “What? He’s here and he brought the cow. That’s what we came for.”

  Clay took the binoculars back and looked all around the mall. The only sign of life was the old man and his cow. “Did you happen to notice he’s alone?”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “What if I told you I was going to travel all this way to meet up with a few strangers for a trade—what would you have said?”

  “I would have said you were a moron,” Geoff said. He sat in silence as his words sank in. “Oh. Right.”

  They waited in the truck while Clay contemplated their move. Should they stay put until the man leaves? As Clay observed the man check his wristwatch on several occasions, he knew that moment wasn’t far off.

  “Well, whatever you decide, dude, I’m behind ya one hundred percent,” Geoff said. “I trust your instinct.”

  Clay wrestled with himself for several more minutes as he tried to make a decision, but he was no closer to an answer than he was when he first saw the man round the corner. “Screw it,” he said as he jumped out of the cab onto the asphalt and into the rain. Geoff followed closely behind and they walked toward the mall’s parking lot. The man finally spotted them and gave a friendly wave from afar.

  “Keep your head on swivel,” Clay said out of the corner of his mouth.

  “Hello there!” the old man said as they approached. “I was beginning to wonder if you were going to show. I hope the trip up here wasn’t too much trouble.”

  Clay held out his hand, palm up, and let the raindrops hit his skin. “It was wet,” he said gruffly.

  The man let out a gravely laugh followed by a few coughs. He was an older man with a bit of a waddle in his gait. He didn’t seem to be in all that great of shape or health. Something wasn’t adding up; the nagging voice screamed at Clay to walk away.

  “I hear ya. I got hammered hard most of the way here from Wichita Falls.”

  “So,” Clay said, shrugging off the man’s comment, “we have what you asked us to bring, so if you don’t mind, let’s wrap things up so we can be on our way.” Clay looked over and nodded. Geoff slid the bag off his shoulder and placed it on the ground.

  “Well, hold on there,” the man said. “I would like to get to know a little bit about you, first. I’ve had this girl for four seasons now,” he said as he stroked the cow’s head. “We’ve been through a lot together, her and me. And I would like to make sure she’s going to a decent home. You say you have a farm or something of the sort?”

  This is bad, Clay thought.

  “That’s right,” Geoff said wearily. “We’ll take care of her—she’ll be fine.”

  “That’s good. Got plenty of drinking water? She looks like a cow, but drinks like a camel,” the man said with a chuckle.

  “Why are you stalling?” Clay barked, his grip tightening around the handle of his AR-15.

  The man stepped back, acting offended. “Stalling? I guess I’m just from a different era than you two youngsters. Back in my day, folks took time to get to know—”

  CRACK!

  Both Clay and Geoff whipped their heads around in the direction of the gunshot.

  The bridge.

  As Clay and Geoff turned back to the man, they noticed he had distanced himself from them and brandished a sawed off double barrel. Clay and Geoff immediately raised their own rifles.

  “Drop it, old man!” Clay ordered.

  The man kept his shotgun trained on the pair. “Now, come on fellas, you didn’t really think we wouldn’t find your sharpshooter up on that bridge, did you?” he said with a slight grin of satisfaction. “We’ve been at this racket for a long while; there ain’t much we haven’t seen.”

  Clay’s mind was split between Dusty’s predicament and his own. The old man kept his scatter gun trained on them, his finger resting on the trigger. He was about twenty feet away, and Clay and Geoff stood shoulder to shoulder. The fact that his barrel was cut short didn’t help matters, either. At that distance, if he pulled the trigger he would deliver a nasty blow to both Clay and Geoff. Nobody moved.

  The sound of galloping hooves echoed around the parking lot as four men came into sight, two from either side of the storefront. They were all armed, and their allegiance was obviously to the elderly man with the cow.

  Three of the horses spread out, keeping their distance from each other, while the fourth horse stopped a few feet short of the old man. The rider quickly dismounted and walked over to him.

  “So, what do we have here?” the younger man questioned the old man, readjusting his red trucker’s hat. He had a sinister, toothless grin on his face and a worn-out lever action rifle—he certainly enjoyed his post-society vocation.

  “All right, boys, enough playing around. Get those hands up, and don’t try anything foolish or I’ll show you just how quickly I can empty both these barrels,” the old man said.

  Clay and Geoff dropped their rifles, letting them hang from their slings. They both slowly reached their hands into the air. Geoff looked over, expecting for Clay to have some sort of plan; he was not comforted with the blank expression on his friend’s face.

  “Wilber, why don’t you go ahead and see what our friends here brought for us,” the old man said.

  “Sure thing, Pops.”

  Wilber handed his rifle to the old man and walked toward Clay and Geoff, holding some zip ties in one hand and reaching for his Beretta with the other. He was about five feet away when Clay felt the shockwave of the bullet zooming past his head. A cloud of blood exploded out of Wilber’s chest before he crumpled to the ground. The sound of the powerful rifle finally caught up with the bullet, booming across the small downtown scene.

  “Wilber!” The old man cried out in anger and confusion. By the time he realized what had happened, Clay and Geoff had opened fire. The man’s body shook as he absorbed the symphony of bullets from Clay and Geoff’s rifles.

  Gunfire erupted from the other three men who were still on their horses. One of the horses, being startled by the barrage of bullets, bucked his rider off and stormed away from the scene. The man never returned to the fight.

  Clay and Geoff split up and sought cover behind different cars. The last two men continued firing, raining glass down on Clay’s head as he flattened himself up against the door. He swung his body up over the hood and shot at one of the men, but was quickly suppressed by the other. Geoff then stood up and took some of the heat away from Clay, but was also forced back down.

  Geoff looked over at Clay who held up three fingers, then two, then one. Both swung out of cover and opened fire. Geoff successfully took down his target, but Clay missed his. Geoff’s vo
ice ripped through an eruption of more bullets as he screamed out in pain and frustration.

  “Geoff! You all right?”

  Geoff had dropped down to one knee as he clutched a shoulder. “Yeah, I’m fine. Just take care of your guy, would ya?” he said, ribbing Clay for his inaccuracy.

  Unsure of how much ammo was left in his magazine, Clay dropped it and replaced it with a full one. The sound of falling rain was interrupted only by a single potshot Dusty had taken at the man. She didn’t have much ammo left and Clay knew it. He couldn’t count on her to lay down suppressive fire for them, so Clay took a sharp breath in and readied himself. He spun around the front bumper of the car and took aim. Nothing. Panic rose in his chest as he quickly scanned for the last man but was unable to locate him. He had comfort in knowing Dusty was watching the exchange through her optics, so any chance of the man ambushing him was slim, but the situation still unnerved him.

  Clay was considering different reasons for the man’s absence when he saw him pop out from behind a minivan. Clay fired two shots before he heard a click.

  Misfire?

  Clay tugged back on the charging handle and fired again. Click.

  Hearing a slew of profanity leave Clay’s mouth, the man suspected a gun malfunction. He spun around the van and sprinted toward the car Clay used as cover. By the time Clay heard the splashing footsteps, the man leapt onto the car. As soon as his feet planted onto the rusted-out hood, the attacker swung his rifle around and aimed downward.

  That was when Clay saw the flash from the bridge—then he heard the sound—it was over.

  The man’s bulky frame fell forward, nearly pancaking Clay in the process. He turned away from the gruesome cadaver that remained after Dusty’s shot. He had seen his fair share of blood in the last ten years, but sometimes it was still too much to look at, especially up close. He wasn’t sure how much time had passed, but when Clay opened his eyes, both Geoff and Dusty stood in front of him.

  "Well, that kinda sucked," Dusty said as she swiped at her wet, disheveled hair clinging to her face.

  "You don't say?" Geoff said as he held his shoulder, his grip doing little to reduce the blood leaking between his fingers.

  Dusty looked around, spotting several bodies within eyeshot. "Well, on the bright side, it sucked a whole lot more for them."

  Chapter 2

  Clay stared down at his fieldstripped LaRue trying to figure out why it wasn’t firing. He had wracked his brain throughout the slow, wet day of travel, trying to figure out what had gone wrong. Before they left the mall, Clay had tried to fire it again—no joy. Everything, including the trigger assembly, worked well as far as he could tell. The problem had to be something with the bolt carrier group, most likely with the firing pin--the part of his rifle that Clay was least familiar with. He would have to dig a little deeper once they got back to Northfield, where he would have sufficient lighting and no fear of being attacked.

  “Hold still, would ya?” Dusty griped at Geoff as she cleaned his wound.

  “Well, stop stabbing me with your fingers and maybe I won’t flinch so much,” Geoff replied.

  “Waa, waa, waa,” Dusty said, her voice dripping in sarcasm. “It’s just a flesh wound, you wuss,” she added as she reached down and picked up a small glass vial. “Put a couple of drops of this on both the entrance and exit wound.” She handed Geoff the bottle that consisted of a concoction of Melaleuca, Lavender, and a few other essential oils commonly used to prevent infection. Since pharmaceutical antibiotics were pretty much extinct, Megan had become a walking library on the topic of essential oils. At first, Clay didn’t buy into the whole healing potion jargon. He knew that there was some medicinal value to them, but he viewed them more as a supplement rather than a legitimate first line of defense. He quickly backpedaled on his criticisms, however, when he observed firsthand just how effective they could be. In some cases, he felt they were more effective than anything he would be lucky enough to find in a pharmacy. Since Dusty had become something of a field medic, she kept a few bottles of Megan’s various concoctions in her pack—much to the benefit of Clay and Geoff, her usual travel companions. “Let that crap soak in for a little bit and then I’ll bandage you up, okay? That is, if you promise not to cry so much.”

  “You’re such a warm person, Dusty,” Geoff said with a snark in his words, but quickly followed it up with a genuine, “Thanks.” After following Dusty’s directions, Geoff walked over to Clay, who was in the middle of reassembling the rifle. “You okay, man? You get it figured out?”

  “Nope,” Clay said, frustration permeating his voice. “Will have to look into it further when we get home,” he said before letting out an exasperated sigh.

  Geoff knew that gun was important to Clay, for sentimental reasons as much as practical. “I’m sure it’s something simple, you’ll figure it out. And even if you don’t, I am sure Vlad or somebody else will be able to help out,” he said, unsure if there was truth in his words but attempting to give Clay some hope.

  “It’s not just about the gun,” Clay replied with an edge in his voice. “In fact, I don’t even care about the stupid thing right now. What’s got me pissed off is what happened this morning.”

  Clay fumed about the setup earlier. He had barely spoken a word the entire day. Geoff was not thrilled with the events, either, but they came out on the other side relatively unscathed, and that’s all that mattered to him.

  “Look on the bright side, man, we got a cow and some horses. That’s gonna be a huge help for us,” Geoff said.

  “We should have never been there,” Clay barked, but quickly calmed himself. Shouting, especially after nightfall, was never a good idea. “We should have never gone,” Clay reiterated himself in a much more subdued tone. He turned around and walked out of the room. He hoped that Geoff had caught the hint that he wanted to be alone. He took a quick glance over his shoulder and saw his friend walk the opposite direction. Point made.

  He wasn’t mad at Geoff, which is why he just wanted to be alone. He was angry with the situation, irritated with Megan, and he didn’t want to dish that wrath out on his best friend just because he happened to be the closest punching bag around. Clay knew that Geoff was right—the cow and horses were a monumental gain for the group. And even had he known ahead of time that it was going to cost six treacherous bandits their lives, he probably still would have done it. The three of them likely saved future victims a lot of pain and suffering by taking the thieves out, and Northfield benefited from the outcome, but the trap was only a small part of Clay’s frustration. The real issue was his complacency.

  Clay scratched the scruff on his neck as he looked through a cloudy window out into the floor of a large factory. He stood inside a manager’s office or something of the sort, overlooking a massive room filled with degenerate machinery that once provided a living for hundreds of people. Judging from papers, signage and scraps lying around, it was some sort of plastics company. G-A-C Manufacturers.

  Clay heard one of the horses neigh. The sound bounced around the cavernous room, adding to his fears that someone passing through the area might get curious if they heard the livestock. A horse might not be enough incentive to draw in a random traveler—after all, many armed bandits traveled by horseback—but a lowing cow would be a different story. Fortunately, Rudy—the name Dusty gave to the cow—had not been particularly vocal thus far. Clay hoped she would stay that way.

  The weight of the day had taken its toll, and Clay’s eyes became heavy. With his legs hiked up on the old steel desk, he fell asleep sitting in the factory manager’s lumpy office chair. He woke up around 3:30A.M. to a torrential assault on the aluminum roof that spanned the entire building. It was loud, like someone dumping a bag of rice over a snare drum. The jarring noise was too obnoxious for him to fall back to sleep so he pulled out his map and began charting their path back home. With livestock in tow, they wouldn’t be able to just wing it—traveling as far as they could, then seeking shelter at the l
ast minute. Clay circled potential areas for shelter every five to ten miles. He had no idea what kind of distance a cow could cover in a given day, but with the constant rain and a potential ambush always looming, he didn’t want to push his luck. He was going to be careful; he was going to get everyone back home.

  No more mistakes.

  ****

  The last mile home was always the longest for Clay. He could see the farm up ahead, but it felt as if he was walking on a treadmill—his legs moved, but nothing got closer, especially after longer trips out. Mesquite had been the longest trip Clay had ever been on. It had been nearly six weeks since they departed Northfield and the joy that filled Clay when he saw his house was almost euphoric.

  It had barely rained over the last week—an answered prayer—which vastly improved their traveling experience as the ground started to dry out. It was a gorgeous evening; Clay could actually see a few stars in the sky if he looked at just the right spots. Clearer nights like this were still few and far between, making them even more stunning when they did arrive. The sky was lavishly painted with beautiful shades of purple and orange, creating the perfect backdrop for the picturesque farm. The sight tonight was surreal, like something from a painting.