The Age of Embers Read online

  The Age of Embers

  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 AGE OF EMBERS

  Copyright © 2019 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

  Foreword

  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

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Afterword

  Also by Ryan Schow

  THE AGE OF EMBERS SERIES:

  THE AGE OF EMBERS

  THE AGE OF HYSTERIA

  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

  THE COMPLETE SWANN SERIES:

  VANNIE (PREQUEL)

  SWANN

  MONARCH

  CLONE

  MASOCHIST

  WEAPON

  RAVEN

  ABOMINATION

  ENIGMA

  CRUCIFIED

  Foreword

  In my previous series, The Last War Series, I created a Pinterest page for each book with photos of the characters, places and cars as I envision them. I do this for myself as placeholders so I can hold a solitary image in my mind as I move through the books. I will post many of these photos on the private Facebook Fan Page as “character introductions” while I’m writing the new books, as the regular members will attest. I post there often and I’m there daily because I absolutely LOVE my reader base! Not only have many of them become good friends, some members of the group also get to read the books for free in advance. They’ve even helped shape several of the books in The Last War Series. I’m also going to be putting together a stand alone fan-driven book, as was requested by a reader (great idea Joel!), which should be a lot of fun, so I’d love your input as well so we can create an awesome book! With this said, I’m providing several links below. The first is to the Private Facebook Fan Group, the second to the Pinterest Page for The Age of Embers, and the third is to the VIP email list. The VIP email list is merely a way for me to get you updates on the books, pre-release dates, and sale days, not only for this book but for those in several of my other series as well. So, without further adieu…

  CLICK HERE for the Private Facebook Fan Group

  CLICK HERE for The Age of Embers Pinterest Page

  CLICK HERE to join the VIP Email List – If you have already read The Zero Hour, enter anyway to get on the list, and when you have the option to download the book in a secondary email, simply ignore it!

  Chapter One

  You never know when your life is going to crumble. Or how far you’ll fall when it does. Before I took a job with the DEA and turned my life into the catastrophic mess it is now, back when I was just a beat cop working the streets, I watched a woman and her poodle walking down the street. I was in a police cruiser and she wasn’t in the best of neighborhoods at the time. My partner pointed her out. I was already watching her, wondering what she was doing.

  “Does she even know where she’s at?” my partner asked.

  I shrugged my shoulders a lot back then, so that was my answer. There was nothing outwardly special—nothing to draw any real suspicion—but I remember getting the sense that she was lost in her own world, or perhaps, caught in a daydream.

  “Holy cow, man,” my partner belted out as we drove by her, “she looks just like the dog!”

  I remember laughing about it back then. The woman was walking a poodle, and my hand to God, they had the same hairdo, the same body shape.

  That was years ago and I don’t know why I’m suddenly thinking about this woman and her dog right now. Honestly, there shouldn’t be any reason for it. But here I am, thinking about my partner who at the time told me dogs sometimes resemble their owners. I dismissed it then, but now I wonder if he wasn’t on to something.

  Everything started out well and good in my life, but then I grew up and through myriad decisions, most of them ill fated, I ended up here, in the back of some dark parking lot at night on the wrong side of town with a smoking gun in my hand. There’s blood everywhere and three corpses lay shot and sprawled out before me.

  But at least it’s cold.

  Chicago is supposed to be freezing this time of year but it’s not as cold as it could be. The air has a sharp, bitter edge to it, but tonight it feels good on my face. It feels so good I almost take off my jacket thinking it will feel just as good on my beaten body.

  I take a mental inventory of my injuries.

  It’s not pretty.

  My face was pummeled by fists and feet, my ribcage, arms and legs kicked into oblivion. Flexing my hands, I see the split flesh. It happened right after I took a boot to the mouth. That was the shot that really pissed me off.

  Pressing my tongue against the side of a sore tooth, it feels a bit loose. Of course, that’s probably just my imagination.

  Head on a swivel, my senses returning, my eyes dart from window to window of the neighboring houses. Even though a lot of bad things go down on this side of town, people still peek out their windows at the so
und of gunfire.

  Me? I just want to know if there are any witnesses.

  It’s dark outside, I tell myself. The parking lot’s deep, there are no street lights and people have been shooting at the rats all night long. Not that I blame them. Chicago is officially the rat capital of the United States, so there’s that…

  Now is the time I start thinking about the lady and her poodle, and now I know why. Now that I’ve shaken off the beating, now that I survived what would have surely been my own death, I start to wonder, can a man resemble his city the same way dogs sometimes resemble their owners?

  These are the kinds of things guys like me must think about after committing murder.

  The truth is, I live in one of the most dangerous cities in America—a city I both love and despise, a city I vowed long ago to protect. But Chicago has fallen into such moral disrepair, and it’s so riddled with crime, the logical part of me fears there is no turning back.

  Am I the same as this city?

  That’s what I can’t help wondering.

  Looking down at these DTO scumbags, these bone-thin cartel gangsters, I know the part of me who loves this city will beat myself to death upon its rocky shores to protect it, even if it means I must become a monster to do it.

  “I am the monster,” I mumble under my breath. That much is clear to me now. But am I irredeemable? Have I completely gone off the rails?

  God, I think maybe I have.

  I’ve never killed anyone before. Not on purpose.

  The sound of boisterous voices startles me. Sharpens my senses. It’s hard to say how far away they are because it’s late and before they arrived, the block was a pressing silence in the night. These kids, there are maybe three of them, they are heading this way.

  Curse words and laughter fill the air. One of them either throws or kicks a glass bottle down the street; it bounces a few times, then breaks.

  It’s time to do something about these bodies.

  The first is the worst. He’s the heaviest, the most awkward to move. As I hoist and wrestle him into the back of the trunk of my DEA issued deep cover beater—a purple 1970 Plymouth Barracuda—I come to terms with the fact that anything redeeming in me is about to be stamped out.

  The first body goes in easy. These aren’t big men. They’re practically kids. But even kids in a trunk this small take up space. Too much space.

  One of the loudmouths heading this way, he’s going on about his girl’s fat ass and how it’s the same as her mom’s fat ass and blah, blah, blah. His buddies are laughing. Someone shatters the night with a loud and lasting burp, followed by more laughter and insults.

  The first two bodies fit in the trunk, but the third isn’t even close. Putting a move on it, I drag one of the guys out, then pull the other one right up to the taillights. The spare tire needs to go. When I have it, I see it’s flat anyway. I hurl it into the bushes at the edge of the parking lot where it hits a chain link fence making an unwanted ruckus.

  The bodies go back in much easier. By now the voices of the approaching clowns are so close I expect to see them any moment. That’s when I hear them peeing. Rather, they’re peeing, and I hear them talking about it.

  “Knuckleheads.”

  Just down the street a dog starts barking and the guys taunt it with whistling and mocking dog calls. Man, I hate guys like this. I close the trunk lid, but the third body is sitting too high. I start bouncing my weight on the lid, trying to get it to shut.

  It won’t.

  For a second, I stop and let the reality of this moment sink in. I’m an undercover DEA agent who just killed my crew. I had no choice, but still. I try to muster up some feeling about this, but nothing comes about. Don’t I at least feel bad for what I’ve done?

  Good God, I don’t.

  This unresponsive emptiness, this inability to summon even an iota of empathy—above all else—really should concern me. After what I’ve been though, after what I’ve survived, it’s also no mystery as to why I feel nothing.

  I maneuver the bodies around, arranging limbs, turning heads, tucking and pushing and grunting and using more than a few colorful words for fuel. Better. Once I get the trunk lid shut, it still won’t latch in place. I lean on the metal with my full bodyweight, give it a good rocking, then feel it catch and hold.

  “Freaking hell,” I grouse like some angry old fool.

  Turning and leaning against the back of the car, everything hurts. I can’t leave yet. If I do, I’ll drive right by those loudmouth clowns and they will be witnesses at my trial.

  Climbing inside the muscle car that’s nearly a half century old and acts every year of its age most days, still unsure of the right way to get rid of these bodies, I grab my phone, consider the lateness of the hour, then step back out into the cold, shut the door and dial my lieutenant.

  The trio of ruffians finally appear. These kids can’t be more than thirteen, each and every one of them pimp-stepping like there’s some underage taint nearby—a pack of gangbanger groupies with pants too tight, bras pushed too high and makeup worn way too heavy. Instead they get me. Some thug with a beard and messy hair and that hard cartel look making a phone call in the most suspicious place ever.

  My brain tells me it’s dark. But is it dark enough? They probably can’t even make out the details of the old ‘Cuda, other than the deep purple paint job and the ghetto chrome rims.

  Won’t matter if they can, I’m thinking.

  Guys like this, on this side of town, they don’t call the cops for any reason. But these are tough kids. Kids with a few new hairs on their chests, or under their arms, or on their balls. So they front. They run their mouths loud. They eyeball guys like me as if they’re going to do something. I get back in the car, slide my gun off the seat and hold it at my side where they might be able to see.

  The phone finally rings through.

  Xavier Reed picks up.

  “I can’t think of any good reason you’d be calling me at this hour,” my lieutenant and good friend says.

  He sounds awake, but slightly peeved. He’s a newlywed to a gorgeous black girl, Giselle, and the two are in love. God only knows what I interrupted…

  “It’s Fiyero,” I say when he answers, eyes still on the guys walking, brain still rattled from my first triple homicide. When the trio of clowns continue on out of sight, never having seen me, I feel my eyes clear and my attention return.

  “I know who this is,” he hisses into the phone. “Are you high?”

  I clear my throat and say, “Why would I be high?”

  He breathes a sigh of exhaustion. Yeah, I definitely interrupted something. “Why are you calling, Fire?”

  He asks me this because, as a deep cover DEA agent, I’m breaking protocol. What he might already know—what he should be suspecting at this minute—is that something is really wrong. You can say a lot of things about Lt. Reed, but if anything, the man has rock solid instincts and an iron constitution. The problem is, he’s a by-the-book kind of guy. He’s learning though, but what will he do with this?

  “I snapped, man,” I finally admit. “I think I blew my cover tonight.”

  Now he’s quiet. I can already see him in my mind’s eye, wiping a free hand down the front of his face, the same as he always does when the heat starts to gather.

  “Give me the details,” he finally says.

  “My daughter called on the emergency phone at the wrong time.”

  “Yeah?”

  “She never calls.”

  “You gave her your DC line?”

  “No, she doesn’t have my deep cover line.”

  “Then what does any of this have to do with you blowing your cover?”

  Pacing the beaten asphalt lot, the evening chill finally settling into my bones, I look at everything and nothing.

  “Well then?” Xavier asks.

  In the background, I hear Giselle telling him to come back to bed. Her voice is as enchanting as she is beautiful, and for that, I know I should let him
go. Then again, Xavier’s a good looking black guy who can handle himself just fine. He’s smart, crafty with his words and competent enough in his social and political world to land a dime like Giselle.

  I’m not jealous because I have a beautiful woman of my own, but a lot of the guys run their mouths when he’s not around. They let their insecurities and their crappy ass lives cloud the fact that Xavier is extremely good at his job. He’s also loyal to a fault. A champion of the agency. A blind servant to the Law Enforcement Oath of Office.

  “I screwed up,” I admit while chewing on my molars. My mouth feels so dry, I gather up some saliva, spit into the darkness. Is this cottonmouth? “I brought my emergency phone to a buy, not my DC line. So when she called, I was at the buy.”

  Xavier huffs out a breath. The agitation is building. “You moron,” he finally growls.

  I close my eyes, touch my eyebrow, bring back a bloody fingertip. “I know,” I confess, low and reluctant.

  “Why would you do that?”

  Standing in this darkened parking lot in West Chicago just one block over from the 4400 block of Monroe—one of this city’s most hazardous neighborhoods—none of this is lost on me. I run a hand through my hair, stroke my beard, open my eyes to the night sky.