The Barbarous Road: A Post-Apocalyptic EMP Survivor Thriller (The Last War Book 6) Read online

  The Barbarous Road

  Ryan Schow

  River City Publishing

  Copyright

  The eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you are reading this eBook and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy so that you may read it with a clear conscience and not one day end up in hell over a shitty technicality. Thank you for respecting the hard work of the author.

  THE BARBAROUS ROAD

  Copyright © 2018 Ryan Schow. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, cloned, stored in or introduced into any information storage or retrieval system, in any form, or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical without the express written permission of the author. The scanning, uploading and distribution of this eBook via the Internet or via any other means without the express written permission of the author or publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Author’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents—and their usage for storytelling purposes—are crafted for the singular purpose of fictional entertainment and no absolute truths shall be derived from the information contained within. Locales, businesses, events, government institutions and private institutions are used for atmospheric, entertainment and fictional purposes only. Furthermore, any resemblance or reference to an actual living person is used solely for atmospheric, entertainment and fictional purposes.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Cover Design by Milo at Deranged Doctor Design

  Visit the Author’s Website: www.RyanSchow.com

  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  Also by Ryan Schow

  Preface

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  The Terminal Run

  Afterword

  Leave a Mark…

  Also by Ryan Schow

  THE COMPLETE LAST WAR SERIES

  THE LAST WAR

  THE ZERO HOUR

  THE OPHIDIAN HORDE

  THE INFERNAL REGIONS

  THE KILLING FIELDS

  THE BARBAROUS ROAD

  THE TERMINAL RUN

  Preface

  I read plenty of post-apocalyptic fiction and I see mixed reviews for books with cursing, violence and sex. In this series, I’ve done the best I can to keep coarse language to a minimum; I keep sex scenes nondescript as well because if you want that, there’s a bajillion bodice rippers for sale in the Erotica section of Amazon; and the violence is written how I see it for the story. In reality, the 90%–95% of victims in an apocalypse of this magnitude would never just drop dead from boredom. The truth is, these are dangerous, brutal times and people in this fictional setting will inevitably turn nasty and be forced to kill. For those sensitive readers, all I can say is trust me, I’ve tried the best I can to toe the line between necessary and gratuitous.

  With regards to politics, I firmly believe my political opinions do not matter one bit in this context, therefore I have made no attempts to lace any of this story with any political leanings I may or may not have. When the President became a character in this story (that was never planned), I was tasked with making him something, and so in my characterization of him, I did the best I could to give him the attributes I’d want to see in a President. Please understand this is fiction and in no way represents any party currently or formerly in office.

  Finally, you can access The Barbarous Road’s Pinterest page (pictures of the characters, locations and cars) by clicking or tapping HERE. Also, if you haven’t joined the closed group Facebook page for The Last War series, please click over there now as I post regularly with cover reveals, sample chapters to upcoming books, cool inspirational pictures and some of the real life stories that inspired this series. This is also where you’ll find information on my new, upcoming post-apocalyptic series titled The Age of Embers. You can request to join this private group HERE.

  I look forward to seeing you there!

  Chapter One

  The drones moved inland, laying waste to Irvine and moving steadily towards Tustin and Orange. Newport Beach was an obliterated mess. Heading further south, toward Laguna Hills and Mission Viejo, the skies were black. To the north, Huntington Beach was an inferno. Everywhere Marcus looked there was destruction. Everywhere but out to sea. He had to get back to the boat, get supplies, wait maybe one or two more days at best for Nick and the kid, Tyler to return. If they weren’t back by then, they were on their own.

  He had a general lay of the land, but what Marcus didn’t know was where he could go shopping. He knew there was a gigantic retail shopping center across Highway 1 on the other side of the golf course, but he wasn’t looking for Bloomingdale’s, Nordstrom’s or Macy’s. Someone he’d run in to, a lady and her dog, she said there was a Whole Foods but that there was also a Starbuck’s and a Cheesecake Factory as well. She said the center was huge.

  A looter’s paradise, is what she said.

  “Anywhere else?” he asked. Half her hair was burnt away and her dog was wearing diapers for some silly reason he never understood.

  “There’s a Ralph’s across the bay and up Dover,” she said, irritated. “That’s a mess up there, though.”

  “You been there?” Marcus asked.

  “No. Just heard.”

  “Looting?”

  Now she looked at him funny. She looked at his big shoulders and barrel chest; she looked at his beard and his big legs swung over his stolen bicycle; she looked at the .357 tucked in a stiff leather side-belt holster on his right hip.

  Looking back, her eyes were glazed over, her skin blackened by smoke, her clothes filthy with soot rather than grime. He wasn’t sure if she started out homeless or if she was made homeless by the attack. She could have been an admin assistant, a lunch lady, someone who sells insurance out of a strip mall brokerage firm. Who could ever be sure? But the dog? It was an English bulldog with watery eyes, a mammoth under bite and an open sore on its right shoulder. Marcus tried not to get upset at the state of the dog, so he held his cool, forced a smile.

  “We gotta go,” she said, pulling the dog’s leash when she felt Marcus’s eyes drift back down to her baby.

  “How old is she?”

  “It’s a he and he’s four. Now if you’ll excuse us…”

  “You said I should head up Dover. Dover to what?” he asked.

  “Go left on Westcliff,” she said, leaving. “Other end of the block. Behind the CVS.”

  Oh, a pharmacy, he thought. Good.

  “
Thanks,” he grumbled, then turned around and headed back to Hwy 1.

  After Nick and Tyler left the boat to try to find Bailey, they hadn’t come back that night or the next. He had to assume they were gone. Like gone gone. He didn’t know though. While he was waiting for them to return, he’d hit up a few places on Balboa Island before being confronted by a pack of angry neighbors led by a retired Police Chief who made a great case of him not robbing the residents.

  At gunpoint by decent people, Marcus had relented.

  Now he was on a stolen bicycle wandering the streets looking for a grocery store that hadn’t been looted already. He’d come across the Pavilions on Bayside, and the Rite-Aid, but the buildings were half demolished and unstable. Looters were still traipsing in and out, grabbing what they could. Several fights erupted as he looked on at the chaos, and then someone shot someone and he decided to move on from there.

  He’d wandered up the highway, weaving around rows of obliterated and abandoned cars, moving past the dead, the destroyed, the left behind. He broke a few car windows with the butt of the .357, managed to get some water and another gun. A Beretta 9mm with a full mag. He liked the weight and balance of the .357 better, but a gun was a gun and after the violence he saw in the Pavilions, his primary concern for now was his safety.

  The lady and her dog had come from The Bayside Village Marina where the community had held some sort of gathering to figure out what was going on.

  “Bunch of unorganized twats up in there,” she’d said. “Everyone wants to yell and whine about everything they lost. Least they got themselves, you know?”

  “I do,” he’d said. “They still in there?”

  “Most of ‘em.”

  That was on N. Bayside, just up from Balboa Island, across the 1 overlooking the waterway to Upper Newport Bay. He thought of taking the yacht up the waterway, but strategically, it would be a bad move. If the drones returned, they could flank him.

  He’d be a sitting duck.

  Now he was on the 1 which was a graveyard of cars and burnt bodies. The entire scene made him physically sick, left a rolling in his guts that made him question what all this was about. He might have even caught himself crying. It didn’t matter. In this death field, if you don’t cry seeing what you see, honestly, you can’t be human.

  This isn’t a condition of man’s need to dominate and conquer, he told himself. It was something else entirely.

  Even though men kill other men—in life and in war—this was not a man vs. man war. This was unprovoked mass murder. Men, women, children. This was the sick, the elderly, people’s diapered pets. This was entire communities reduced to ash for no reason at all.

  Deep down, he thought he might know why this was happening. Rather, his suspicions were strong, which meant they left no room for any prevailing theories.

  Artificial Intelligence had been a problem for years.

  This had to be a takeover.

  The autonomous drones they built in the military, the combat ready robots that took the grunts off the front lines, the remote controlled tanks…

  Through days and nights of deductive and contemplative reasoning, coupled with all his experience in the Army, Marcus could only assume this was the machines taking control of the military, and of humanity by proxy.

  What fools we’ve been, he nearly said aloud.

  Anyone could see forward progress meant taking some gigantic risks, especially when linking everything to everything. But this? “The Internet of Things” was a term coined to describe online refrigerators, dishwashers, TV’s. It was cell phones connected to computers connected to the internet. It was cars controlled by smart phones with apps and GPS integration and self-driving software that learned your driving habits and mimicked them. You take all this, coupled with a “cloud” and an AI system with machine learning software and quantum computing, and voila, you have a recipe for the end of the world.

  Or maybe he was being too presumptive. It could’ve been Kim Jong-Un’s North Korea breaking agreements. Or President Xi Jinping’s communist China.

  No, he thought. No way.

  It couldn’t be them.

  Why strike town by town targeting people when you could just nuke an entire state? The whole of the western seaboard? And where were the ground forces? The Naval incursions? The pre-war posturing and failed peace-summits? After President Benjamin Dupree took office, within two years he’d brokered peace accords with even our staunchest enemies, all to the dismay of the ever disruptive mainstream media.

  None of this made sense. Not unless you chalk it up to Artificial Intelligence defending itself from their real enemy: humans.

  He slowly pedaled his bicycle up the 1, crossed the waterway and took a right on Dover where the departing traffic of a few days ago had been devastated by drone fire. He was looking at a petrified forest of charred metal. On the hillside to the left, multimillion dollar homes stood in smoking ruin, all the landscape and hillside vegetation now blackened fields of ash. He rode through the small valley, staying on sidewalks where he could avoid the abandoned cars, many of them with the inhabitants still inside, dead. The road took him uphill. He stayed on the pedals, relishing the burn in his thighs, in his calves, in the pumping of his heart and the taste of less-burnt air in his lungs.

  He crossed Cliff Dr. and continued uphill to E. 16th where he passed the remains of Newport Workout and the recently bombed Church of Latter Day Saints. He passed open fields and ugly squat buildings and adobe colored business complexes, and then he hit Westcliff Dr. To his left, the Union Bank was destroyed. By now the dirty air sat like char in his lungs and his eyes were starting to burn. Hanging a left on Westcliff showed him a long row of ugly apartment complexes (like something thrown up in the early 70’s) that were smoldering, half of them now relegated to rubble.

  Entire families were on the side of the road, crying, waiting for firetrucks that would not come, police who would not be seen, a reprieve that would save them from the realization that no one knew how to handle this situation.

  Riding down Westcliff (apartments leading to strip malls leading to larger shopping centers with fountains and anchor stores), a lot of the vegetation had been spared, giving it half a chance of not looking like the battlefield of the apocalypse. As he coasted by this strip mall business called The House of Morrison, a huge brawl was underway. There was screaming and yelling and the kind of wild fighting you used to see in baseball, or hockey when there was a bench clearing. He paid it no mind. This wasn’t his fight.

  To the right he passed the Bank of America (which was currently being robbed in the most anticlimactic heist ever), and then he hit the Westcliff Plaza where he saw signs for Ralph’s and CVS Pharmacy.

  There were a lot of people in tents filling the parking lot. Also, people were living out of their cars and eating off cheap barbecues like it was some kind of extended tailgate party where no one was having any fun. They were sitting on lawn chairs smoking and watching all the looters go through the CVS and places like the GNC and the pet supply store. Oddly enough, no one even bothered to rob the Yoga store or the Massage Envy.

  All around, the smells of burnt wood, cooking meat and baked urine permeated the air. People’s dogs were left off their leashes and running around everywhere. A couple of terriers took up a trot beside his bicycle, barking up at him merrily while some overfed woman in a flowery housedress took chase, screaming their names.

  “Barkly! Chester! You getcher asses back here right now!” she was shouting, her meaty jowls shaking, real anger in her ugly, beady eyes.

  The dogs pulled away, returned to their slovenly master while Marcus continued his trek through what looked like half a tent city and half a detention center.

  In the corner of the buildings, in side-by-side lawn chairs just past the Core Reform Pilates, two teenagers were making out—his hand up her shirt, her hand on his knee leaning into him. So this is what the fall of society looks like, he thought to himself. Tent cities, dogs off leashes
, public displays of affection involving first base and a serious lack of decorum.

  His mother, if she were still alive, would be horrified.

  He got to the Ralph’s shopping center and there were employees and security guards out front. He pulled his bike up to a massive pack of maybe fifty or sixty people who were yelling about how it was immoral to withhold food from the starving.

  Some people were holding up fistfuls of cash, yelling about how they could pay, trying to push though the human barrier staving off the crowd. Folks who were probably so civilized in normal life would now sell their soul for a loaf of bread and some cheese. The security guards, out of shape as they were, were carrying guns and batons. They had formidable looks on their faces. And the employees? They were just a bunch of college kids with funny hair, piercings and body art they were no longer covering due to recent changes in working conditions.

  “What’s the deal?” he asked a bald guy standing at the back of the pack.

  He was a skinhead by the look of him, maybe in his early thirties. His head had several scars and his ears, nose, lips and eyebrows boasted the now vacant holes of too many piercings at an early age. They guy had a decent build, but he wasn’t as aggressive looking as he could be. Which is to say, he wasn’t pulling attitude or posturing up.