Looking Back Through Ash Read online

  “Better watch your back, you son-of-a-bitch,” the hairy man seethed through clenched, busted teeth, after Daniel had gotten far enough away to regain some of his lost boldness.

  “Okay…Thanks,” Daniel laughed, waving behind him.

  Every fiber of his being wanted to turn around and put the man down for threatening him. There was no such thing as a hollow threat in this world. The hairy man had definitely meant it and Daniel was already projecting what he had said out into the future. From now on, every trip made to the Warehouse would be even more taxing than it already was, tainted by this man’s words. Daniel would most definitely have to watch his back. This was made all the more difficult because of the fact that he had to come here alone.

  It had always been a struggle for Daniel to control his temper. His formative years had been spent in isolation and he had never quite mastered the act of controlling his emotions. It was a hard thing to accomplish, being master and student at the same time. The depths of his anger grew with every step away from the drifters. Some of the anger directed itself at Corinne, his wife, who refused to come back to the Warehouse, despite having been basically raised there. She would not allow their four year-old daughter, Rebecca, to even step one foot inside either.

  This was not because of the inherent dangers associated with the Warehouse; Daniel might even be able to understand that. Corinne’s reasoning, however unbelievable, was far more irrational than this. The root of her outright refusal to come back was the result of her mother, Susan Locke. For some reason, Susan had made zero effort to support or even acknowledge Corinne and Daniel’s marriage. Point of fact, not once had Susan ever left the comfort of the Warehouse housing units to come visit her daughter, or subsequently her granddaughter, at the Moore’s home.

  This broken relationship between mother and daughter often worried Daniel, but now, especially after what had just happened, it infuriated him even more. If Corinne would have just come along, they could have parked on the other side of the Warehouse in the secured lot. She still retained the tag on her mother’s old car that would permit this benefit. Daniel’s wife and daughter could have visited with Susan, like normal people would often do, while he went off to do the shopping. In doing so he could have avoided the impeding drifters altogether. Just because he had residency and helped design, build, and supervise key modifications that went into making the Warehouse what it was today, it did not mean he was welcome in all areas. There were still plenty of people around who held his surname against him.

  Corinne’s only form of revenge to combat Susan’s shocking behavior was to never be the one who gave in first. She wouldn’t let Daniel take Rebecca along or let him use her car all because there was the slight chance that he might run into her mother. The whole thing confounded Daniel to no end; even though he loathed his father, he could not help wishing him alive from time to time.

  The overlooked variable in all of this was Rebecca, who only got to spend time with her grandmother on Wednesdays and Thursdays, the two days of the week when she attended the community daycare center while her parents went to work; Daniel with the Maintenance Department and Corrine as the general adjunct to the New Warren Council. Susan Locke once held the title of Director of Housing on the Council, but she left the position shortly after “injuring” her hip, which mysteriously happened to coincide with the week Corinne left to live with Daniel.

  To see Rebecca, Susan would sit outside the Warehouse smoking her pungent cigarillos, waiting for Daniel to drive off in one of the Maintenance Department vehicles from the parking lot across the street. She would then take her electric cart over to City Hall, where the school and daycare were located. This maneuver gained Susan the unfettered access to Rebecca that she desired, without having to deal with Daniel or Corinne. Rebecca never understood why her grandmother always told her not to let her parents know about her visits, but after her mother’s reaction to the first time she let it slip, the young girl never mentioned it again.

  Sporadic trips to the Warehouse bazaar and two days a week working for the Maintenance Department, always on the endless upkeep for the water and power systems, were the extent of Daniel’s forays into the world now. Two years ago, when the Maintenance Department cut his work load down, he was unofficially put in charge of raising Rebecca. It was as if parts of his old life withered and died, only to be surreptitiously replaced by the chores of parenthood.

  Rebecca and Daniel took their baths together and he always tucked her into bed at night. It was up to him to cook all of the family meals and work on home-schooling her; the public schools were only free to those who lived inside the housing area of the Warehouse. Daniel looked forward to this task, because he still had plenty of useful books and enjoyed the act of teaching his daughter new things. Besides, the school was notoriously filled with governmental propaganda.

  Even though Corinne only had her part-time job working as admin for the Council, it always consumed the bulk of her weekly allotments of patience, stress, and energy. Daniel tried his best to make life bearable for Corinne and pleasant for Rebecca. His empathetic work load was rarely complained about; it was still a far cry better than being alone.

  Daniel made it down to his passed-along and thoroughly rusted truck. He looked over his shoulder for the hundredth time, making sure that his new friends were not following behind. After lifting up the access hatch on the rear of the heavily-patched aluminum cap, he placed the two bags into the bed of the truck. His left knuckles struggled to relax, aching from the constant angry grip that he had been keeping on the burlap.

  Manually unlocking the driver’s door, Daniel slid into the threadbare seat of the formerly black extended-cab truck. The key ring still held a dozen keys that no one still alive knew which locks they fit and a key fob, its battery long dead. He only left the useless items dangling from the ring because they had once held some kind of meaning to his father, and to take them off seemed like an affront to his memory. For quicker access, Daniel pulled the pistol out and wedged it between the exposed foam cushion of his seat and the cloth upholstery of the center jump seat.

  After giving the twenty year-old engine a minute to idle out a little smoother, he eased out into the empty seven lanes of Klondike Avenue, rear differential clunking ominously as the truck shifted gears. Despite there being no other cars visible, he still looked both ways for people coming to and from the Warehouse. A practiced right turn followed by an immediate left had him picking up Cannon Drive at its western end. He passed by the busy City Hall building, which was on his right, before continuing on towards the east and the safety of home.

  Once on the road, after checking the mirrors several times, Daniel calmed down a little. All of the anger he was misdirecting at Corinne dissipated; it was not her fault that men like that existed. ‘I’m just glad she still works for the Council,’ he thought kindly of his wife. ‘Without her stipends…’ Although it was his mind that had started the panic-inducing thought, it was his body that punctuated it with a shiver. Corrine was paid well, far better than he was anyway.

  Daniel had become very adept at storing away all of the food that he bought or traded for at the Warehouse. He had amassed quite the larder in the basement by buying items in bulk and then finding clever ways to prolong its shelf life. With his meager pay barely covering the water bill now, this practice of long-term storage had become the main way that he helped out the household. All of the bigger fixes that he put into the house were just expected of him and he usually never got much credit for those.

  Fear over his family’s future filled the conscious mind to brimming while the subconscious managed the task of driving him home. His thoughts started to meander down all of the usual dark pathways, eventually settling on the household checklist which was always kept close to the surface. Chores like scavenging and cleaning plastic bottles to store bags of beans or corn in had just become way of life, so had dropping a small perforated sachet of rice and salt into the bottles first to absorb a
ny residual moisture left in the food.

  Stockpiling items like tinder, matches, and candles was done out of necessity. While a makeshift light could be made out of nearly any shallow container, just by adding a tightly rolled strip of cotton to the fuel it contained; lanterns were much more portable and distinctly brighter. The hundreds of candles that he had once owned, all collected from the surrounding houses when he was younger, were close to being depleted, and he had even been forced to break-up and melt down all of the color-streaked, volcano-like glass bottles that were left behind. Daniel molded new candles by using a cardboard tube as the form and a spool of cotton twine as the wick. As a result, he had just recently started buying the often-inferior beeswax and tallow candles. They never burned as clean or as long, and they usually gave off an odor that was anything but fragrant.

  The generator sitting in the Moore’s garage was never used anymore; they simply could not afford the gas to run it. Several red plastic 5-gallon jerry cans sat next to it in the garage, but only one of them was full of stabilized gasoline, and it was one of their most prized and cherished possessions. The house did have solar panels on the south side of the roof. Unfortunately, the ash falling from a series of new volcanoes in French Polynesia had rendered them useless.

  The impact of the volcanoes was felt in every corner of the globe and its grit fouled machinery of all forms. Solar panels were ruined as the number of particulates increased, dimming the sun and damaging the panels themselves, most of which occurred when grit-filled rain fell, or when winter snows compressed on the panels before slowly sliding downward, carving away at the thin glass shroud over the photovoltaic cells, like repeated miniature glaciers. Food production took a sharp decline and when this was combined with the travel bans some localized starvations began.

  With the world already ailing from the ash shroud, terrorists attacked three nuclear generating stations in three different states; Watts Bar on the Tennessee River, South Texas on the Gulf of Mexico, and Enrico Fermi II on the Detroit River. Large swaths of the country were plunged in to darkness and the electricity that everyone depended on was never to return in most places. Chaos reigned as uncontrolled evacuations took place causing further conflict within the neighboring areas. When the Department of Continuance arrived in the decimated city of Warren after a year of confusion and pain a strained sense of normalcy returned with them.

  What this meant to the Moore’s today, without any form of refrigeration, was that they only stored canned, jarred, and dried goods. Any small amounts of extra fresh meats, fruits, or vegetables that they found themselves with went straight into the dehydrator box for preservation. Daniel found it easiest just to dry everything thoroughly. The resultant dried food could be reconstituted days, weeks, or sometimes even months later.

  Slowing the truck to a snail’s pace, Daniel watched a substantial band of scavengers at work. He had never witnessed an operation of this size before. Not only was the group the largest he had ever seen in this area, at least four families strong, but they looked to be very well organized as well. They were currently working together to systematically strip apart a house. The choicer contents of which had already been emptied out by Daniel long ago.

  It took a painstaking amount of work to crack apart a home for the copper piping and wiring hidden within its walls and ceilings. Numerous piles of salvage dotted the overgrown front yard of the stick-framed house. The rubble was being dumped out of the way, tossed into a waterless swimming pool. Gutters were heaped into one pile, while tubing and wires were being stacked in others. Several mounds of lumber and other indiscernible items were strewn about, but this was not at all done in a random fashion.

  The haggard men, women, and children, some no older than Rebecca’s four years, stopped working to give the passing truck hard stares. A man, who was pulling the last of the shingles from the roof shouted something obviously meant to be derisive before throwing a chunk of brick pulled from the tumbled chimney at the gawking man in the truck. The projectile sailed through the rare blue sky, all eyes following its path. It twisted and spun majestically before landing just short of the road, catching in the deep grass. Even though the man had missed what he had been aiming for, given the distance to the moving target, it had the desired effect; Daniel sped back up.

  ‘I guess that’s what people have been reduced to,’ Daniel thought, not realizing that his mind had jumped tracks on him.

  These days, at least in this corner of the darkened world, everything meant to be perishable had already perished, either by means of consumption or contamination. Common items became rare, and rare items became non-existent. Adding to this problem was every new person that moved into the area, who only stretched out thinner what little resources did remain.

  The Department of Continuance, which was shortened to D.o.C. and pronounced as ‘dock’, had helped prolong the fate surrounding Detroit. Brought into existence by a series of Presidential Orders, the D.o.C. was responsible for dealing with the combination of problems that plagued America at the time; namely the falling ash and serial riots. Even so, ever since their establishment of the compulsory ‘dark’ days, where power was cut to all but a few key parts of New Warren during daylight hours, everyone around knew that even the Department of Continuance, once thought to be all-powerful, was now running low on supplies.

  Due to the lack of options left available to him without the use of the generator and electric hotplates, the only thing that really changed for Daniel was his having to get more creative about how he cooked meals. At first a propane camping grill did most of the toil, but now that almost all of their extra propane bottles had all been used up, and that the price to refill a single thirty pound tank was nearing twenty stipends, he had all but abandoned it. Instead, Daniel saved what little propane the family still owned for use in the retro-fitted water heater.

  A decade ago, National Guard mobilizations secured all of the propane filling stations and the stored massive inventories around their individual states. When the D.o.C. finally started refining new diesel and gasoline again, the by-product of which was more propane, they helped replenish what had been used thus far. After a short lapse, roughly a year to two years in most places, where the people went without assistance from the still developing D.o.C., the reformed government began supplying goods again. The city of New Warren was one of the first on the list to begin receive supplies, as the nuclear disaster to the south was given priority to be dealt with. Convoys started delivering the propane, different grades of fuel, and packaged foodstuffs, all of which had to be first flown into Selfridge Air National Guard base. Those trucks were now becoming increasingly infrequent and, when they did show up, the prices were frequently higher.

  Daniel’s other limited options included solar ovens for making cornbread, muffins, or bannock, weather and dust level permitting, and fondue gel, which worked just fine to heat up the scarce can of soup or portion of fresh food of similar size. Almost every house that he searched in his youth held a screw-top tin or refill bottle of the flammable gel, and he made sure to collect it all. Several ‘pop can stoves’, what his dad would call ‘penny stoves’, gave just the right amount of heat and time to cook rice or beans.

  His father had taught him how to make the small burners using nothing but salvaged aluminum cans, a sharp knife and a sharp nail. He had also left behind four cases of pure methanol fuel additive. The liquid within these yellow plastic bottles burned hot and clean, especially when used as fuel inside the fabricated stoves. Unfortunately, just like everything else his supply was running short with all of the increased usage. Although, he had just recently discovered that moonshine worked almost as well.

  The Moore family lived just over three miles north of the Detroit barriers, which put them some fifteen miles within the quarantine zone. The rampant fires that had once plagued the unprotected areas, spreading unchecked, meant that New Warren had to outlaw the use of outside fires. Half-charred neighborhoods were apt to reignite, e
specially during the dry summers and winters. Fire was not just another concern to the city and its residents, it was one of their main concerns. Under the threat of harsh-to-severe penalties, most everyone, which included Daniel, obeyed. New Warren had managed to pull together fairly decent firefighting equipment and trained its volunteers well, but even with these safeties in place campfires and the burning of garbage were still strictly prohibited within city limits.

  Using a fireplace to cook or heat your home was still permitted as long as the Maintenance Department came out to inspect the flue first. Daniel had gone through cords of wood heating a portion of the house during the winters, so he naturally cooked a lot by using the coals and a Dutch oven. It was amazing how much of his life was spent concerned with feeding himself and his family. It seemed that he was either cooking, cleaning, buying, storing, steeping, or eating.

  It was still far better than being alone.

  Chapter 2

  After Daniel made the turn north off of Cannon drive he navigated the labyrinth of traversable roads within his burnt and barren subdivision. Most surface streets, especially those a mile and a half away of the Warehouse and City Hall were blocked off at various points. This was done intentionally in some cases, usually by a new water line or by residents not wanting visitors, but most of the time they had become naturally chocked by wind felled and driven trees. In this particular area few homes stood in a habitable state and only a fraction of those were occupied.

  The path home required a meandering style of driving to avoid the numerous obstacles across the split and rutted roads, swerving around small sink holes and fallen trees. Some of these trees had been too large to be removed and it was far easier to drive around them on one of the formerly pristinely-manicured lawns. The smaller limbs, hacked from the tops of the trees to make a passageway large enough for a vehicle were piled up to aide in jumping curbs and as fill for the larger holes in the ruptured roadway.