From the Ashes Read online

  “Uh huh,” she said, nodding once. “There’s a lot of them.”

  * * *

  The first thing I noticed was when the birds went quiet, leaving only the sounds of crashing waves and the spring breeze in my ears.

  The next was when Marcus and another of his troops erupted from the treeline above the cliff. Their descent to the ancient, cracked asphalt was slowed by a rope running through their harnesses. Marcus hit the deck, rolled, and snapped his carabiner free as his troops followed him into open air. It was a 40- or 50-foot drop, but the ropes made it survivable. They rolled to their feet and gathered their ropes, so they wouldn’t be left behind for the enemy to use. I broke from cover and ran to assist.

  “Two minutes, maybe three,” Marcus wheezed. “Hundreds, easy.” Komainu bodies kept sailing into the void above us, slowed by their self-belaying ropes, and landing safely, more or less, on the hard-pack. It wasn’t remotely safe, but neither was getting overrun. Marcus had lost a dozen or so of the 36 under his command. Whether they were dead, captured, hiding, or otherwise, they weren’t coming.

  “Go!” I shouted, pointing back across the bridge. “Form up on Pass Island, pike hedge both sides of the foot path, and get the archers ready to support.” The troops turned to go, and I caught Marcus by the sleeve. “You know about the final protective fire, right?” His eyes widened, but he nodded. “Get Karisa to check below the bridge and confirm everything’s sited correctly.”

  I turned back in time to watch the first of the enemy, whoever they were, explode from the tree line. Howls of rage turned to whoops of terror mid-air. They didn’t have ropes, the fools, and long shadows hid the cliff. They leapt without looking.

  Several thumped into the pavement and didn’t rise again. They weren’t dead, not yet, but their knees and ankles had shattered with audible cracks on impact. I put them out of their misery with the tip of my new katana, while their comrades above, who stopped before reaching the edge, retreated into the woods and followed the cliff north.

  I didn’t have long to wait. They only had to backtrack 200 or 300 yards before they could reach the road safely, and a few short minutes later, they came rushing back, clumped together in a mob, axes and blades in hand.

  Specialists got a lot of training. When not on an op, we trained. Until Obsidian’s Agents came along, most Specialists died in ambushes—combat was our natural environment, and we were hard to kill. To keep their investments alive, Teledyne hired some of the best trainers available, and cycled us through all manner of martial arts and gun drills. I’d studied Krav Maga under an elite Israeli commando, I’d earned my third-degree belt in both Japanese and Brazilian Jiujutsu, and I’d been schooled by a combat engineer in sabotage and improvised explosives and demolitions. I’d loved kenjutsu the most—it’s why I’d spent so much time forging the katana on my hip.

  In one movement, I stepped aside, drew my katana, and slashed up and across my body. The lead barbarian’s arm came off at the elbow, and his axe got him in the shin. He dropped, bloody and screaming. I pivoted and slashed forehand, deflecting another blade, and drove the tip of my katana through a chin in a messy spray. One of the barbarians had an ancient baseball bat, spiked with nails. With so many of his comrades already dead, he’d slowed to take my measure. He stood like a batter, ready to club me, but his lead foot was exposed, and I had the reach. I slashed low, carving into his calf, and his face assumed the pained look of a man who knew he was about to die. His leg collapsed under him, and I stabbed him in the heart to finish him quickly. The rest died messily, and I finished off those who’d been crippled. A dozen men in bloody pieces littered the road, and my white, wooden armor dripped red.

  I was puzzled though, Marcus wouldn’t have fled from a mere dozen mainland barbarians, not when he outnumbered them three to one. And not when there was another, larger force out there somewhere. How large didn’t matter—I would hold this ground for as long as I had to. Marcus’ survivors wouldn’t be enough, and it was a race to see who would get to the bridge first—this mainlander’s marauding army of filthy barbs or our ranked, disciplined companies of Komainu.

  * * *

  The horde arrived first, as it turned out. I rose to my feet, my left hand on my scabbard, my right hand on the hilt of my blade. Those at the head of the pack were unarmored brutes with hatchets, axes, short swords, and knives. A big guy in the center led the charge. None of them could match my speed or my strength—I was a Specialist, and they were poor, dumb barbs, half-starved and half-crazed from their brutal life in the remnants of the sprawl. With enough room to maneuver in front of me and three decades of martial arts training behind me, they didn’t stand a chance.

  As the last one died, I heard a shout behind me as Ayame and Mikael rushed to join me on my side of the bridge. I didn’t know what, exactly, the enemy was waiting for, but you should never interrupt your enemy when they’re in the middle of making a mistake.

  “One for the money,” Ayame said as she unfurled her preferred hand weapon, a weighted chain called a manrikigusari. With a five-pound flanged mace head at one end and six feet of steel link, she could spin, smash, throw and strike with it from a distance.

  “Two for the show,” Mikael agreed. He’d lost his katana in a fight a decade before, and he had never replaced it. He drew his wakizashi as his primary weapon, and a tanto in his off hand.

  “Three to get ready,” I said, then shouted the chorus: “Are you ready motherfuckers? LET’S GO!”

  We charged.

  If one Specialist had demolished the first 30 vanguard, three Specialists tore into their lines like wheat before a scythe. I’d struck down eight, maybe ten, before the first one connected with a hard blow to my leg with a club or a mace. The armored, shaped plywood on my shins absorbed the blow, but it hurt. I lashed out, separating the offending raider’s head from his shoulders, and worked the line, blade flicking in and out, spilling entrails, slashing throats, and chopping limbs. It was a bloody, messy, terrible battle that allowed no time for thought, just action and reaction.

  I got dogpiled by a massive brute who outweighed me despite my nanites and improvements. It took work to get that big in a starving, fallen world. He was inside my reach, and his tackle drove me to the ground. He reared up, ready to beat me with gauntleted fists, when Ayame’s whirling maelstrom of chain and steel smashed across his jaw, nearly twisting his head off his shoulders. Stunned, he rocked back, and I posted up and threw him aside. He sprawled to the ground behind Kael, who snap kicked the barb in front of him to clear some room and brought his wakizashi down across the brute’s throat. I kipped up and pressed the fight, but we had lost the initiative, and the horde was pressing down on us again. I didn’t know who they were, but they were fighting savagely, taking terrible losses. If anyone was running, I hadn’t seen them yet.

  An axe bit into my armored breastplate. I dropped my elbow on my attacker’s arm before uppercutting him in the face. I pulled the axe from the plywood, reversed it, and threw it Frisbee-style into the crowd. Someone went down with a dent in his forehead where the axe struck him and disappeared behind the screaming horde. My chest ached—they’d probably broken my rib.

  The sun had been low in the sky when Marcus’ troops came over the cliff edge, and now, the sun was setting to our left flank, across the water beyond the Olympic Mountains.

  The press of battle steadily forced us back. I held one footpath, Kael took another, and Ayame and her manrikigusari held the middle. With water to my left and rusted wrecks to my right, I was in a narrow corridor where I could put my back to the trucks and cars and add gravity back into my arsenal. Now that we were “safely” on the bridge and not fighting across the massive space, arrows began raining down on the main body of the barbarian army. They didn’t seem to have any effective ranged weaponry, but the longer I fought, the tougher my opponents became. It seemed the vanguard had been mostly new, unskilled, untalented cannon fodder, and the true warriors were in reserve. I front kicked
another barb, sending him screaming over the edge of the bridge to the rocky shore below, but it occurred to me that this one had a shield, and there weren’t any barbs pressing in behind him.

  I cautiously leaned out from my protective alcove, and my night-enhanced eyes saw that the host had built a shield wall in an arc at the end of the bridge. A tall, lean figure stood at the center, but it was too dark to make out any details.

  Glad for the respite, I took several deep breaths, confirming that my rib was indeed broken, but, aside from a few minor cuts and gashes, I wasn’t bleeding anywhere I had to worry about.

  “Rikimaru! Rikimaru Hanzo!” the figure shouted. His pronunciation was formal and very British, and his voice carried. It bounced around in my brain for a moment—I knew that voice. “You’ve killed quite enough of my men today, Rikimaru. Come here, and let’s discuss matters.”

  I should have refused to play his game, but that voice gnawed at me and sent a shiver up my spine. I hadn’t been afraid of anyone in decades, but that voice triggered an instinctive gut clench that was off-putting.

  “Kael needs a minute,” Ayame whispered to me. “I quote, ‘Stall for time, until the bleeding stops.’”

  “He’s a damn fool,” I cursed. “Does that voice sound familiar to you?”

  “No.” She shook her head.

  “Yes,” Kael spat. “But I hope to God I’m wrong. How does he know your name?”

  “If this goes sideways, go with the FPF plan and protect the base. At all costs. Wait here.”

  “Come out Rikimaru, I don’t have all week,” the barb leader shouted again.

  I stepped carefully over the bloody, slippery asphalt of the bridge’s footpath, until I was close enough to see the figure calling my name.

  Gaunt.

  Of all the sons of bitches that have ever walked this Earth, Stephen Gaunt had brought an army to my front step.

  He’d always been very…proper. Even now, twenty years after the world fell, he was wearing a stained, but reasonably intact, button-up collared shirt and a thin, blood-red tie. Combat boots poked out from under the cuff of his smoke grey slacks, and a single knife hung from his belt.

  “What are you doing here, Gaunt?” I asked. “Last I checked, you were in Utah, and that was before the bombs fell.”

  “Rikimaru, it’s so good to see you again,” he replied. “Yes, I was in Utah, but I rode out the end of the world in Vegas! ‘Twas quite glorious, a shame we can’t do it all again, I’d have taken more souvenirs! Afterward, I went north to SeaTac, by way of Oregon. It’s been twenty years, and it’s a long walk. I’ve had the north end of the sprawl under my control for a year or so, but you know what they say…amateurs study tactics, professionals study logistics. My…” he gestured widely at the barbarian horde at his heels, “associates, are sick and tired of ratburgers and grilled seagull. The whole city’s a bit of a mess. We can’t drink seawater, and there’s not enough fresh to go around. The harbor is too polluted for crabs or fish. To be frank, it’s appalling. And ‘ere you are, quietly hoarding the ocean’s bounty. I’m hurt.”

  “They don’t look much like fishermen, Gaunt,” I observed. “They look more like people who’d burn a village, then rape the women by firelight.”

  “Hah, this…mob?” Gaunt laughed. His voice twisted. “I suppose it would be more romantic that way. No, I just came to see if the rumors were true, that a few old Teledyne troops had made themselves warlords of the islands, and to handle them if they had. And ‘ere you are.”

  “Enough chit chat, Gaunt. Are we going to do this?”

  “Quite,” he responded, and quick as a viper, he flung a throwing knife at me, underhanded. I dove aside and came up to my feet, blade ready. He was laughing, and he allowed his marauding savages to rush us again. They pressed me back onto the bridge, all the while weathering the ranked volleys of arrows fired at them by my Komainu.

  With the three of us partway across the bridge, sections of Komainu advanced to hold our flanks and plugged the footpaths to hold the line. It became a battle of attrition and exhaustion. Arms grew tired of holding shields steady, and thrusting spears and swords were slower and had less power. Arrows from our archers fell short of the bridge. I heard Marcus shouting orders far behind me, rotating out our spear hedges for rest and keeping the lines fresh. Fighting by moonlight meant lots of mistakes, and we lost too many good people.

  * * *

  We fought all night. I was slashed, stabbed, and cut several times, but never seriously. Their sheer number had pushed us back, further and further. We were losing ground a foot at a time. Ten yards from the end of the first bridge, Kael ordered an orderly withdrawal to the far side of the second bridge. The archers collected the few arrows they had left. We’d already brought up barrels full of arrows from the second defense point, but we’d never expected an entire night of fighting. They’d redoubled the pressure, and we’d fallen back again. His barbarian army now occupied the length of both bridges.

  Kael and Ayame were holding the line as sunrise finally pierced the shadows. I’d rotated off to tend to an injury and get some food downrange. I cinched another bandage on my calf and threw away the damaged shin guard. The nanites coursing through my blood would clot the wound quickly, but it was a ragged wound from a jagged spearhead, and it would need some time to heal.

  As I made my way back down the center of the bridge, I heard a shout and a curse. Evidently Gaunt had had enough of buying ground with his troops’ blood, and he came forward on his own.

  Kael was down, crawling backward with one hand and pressing the other tightly over his ribs. Ayame had dropped her spear and her ball-and-chain was sizzling through the air, creating a whirlwind even Gaunt couldn’t advance through. I scooped Kael up and got him down from the wrecks, behind our shield wall. From there, I fireman-carried him to the rear at a run and left him with Marcus and Karisa.

  “Make ready for FPF,” I snapped. Marcus opened his mouth to object, but Karisa nodded. “When I give the order. No matter what.”

  “We will, Daimyo.”

  I returned to the line and found that Gaunt had backed off enough to be out of range of Ayame’s whirling mace, and he had the army at his heels. Our troops backed off as well, reforming at the south end of the bridge. He smiled when he saw me coming, hands clasped behind his back, standing on the roof of an old Escalade as though he were giving a speech.

  “This is your fault, you know,” he called. “This whole…end-of-the-world mess. Teledyne launched the nukes; Kojima held the codes.”

  “Bullshit,” I snarled.

  “Why would I lie, Rikimaru?”

  “Because you’d stab a man in the gut just because it’s a miserable way to die, you sonofabitch.”

  “True,” he conceded, “but, also true: I had a run at stealing the codes from Kojima before our op in Salt Lake. We weren’t into outright warfare yet, and they needed an operative who could be rational, a man like you. There’s a reason they didn’t send your man, Mikael, to Utah. They didn’t trust him to let bygones be bygones and get the job done. Tell me, when you fled the city, did you or did you not get more notice than anyone else?”

  It had been two decades, and I couldn’t be sure what I knew—what I remembered—anymore.

  “Ayame, check in with Marcus and Karisa. See to Kael.” I pointed to the bridge, where the rest of my troops waited, safe for the moment. “Stephen and I are going to settle this once and for all.”

  I drew my katana and stepped down onto the hood of an old F175. Gaunt held the knife loosely in his hands as he brought them out in front of him, and I watched his shoulders for movement. We clashed, and despite my reach, my reflexes, and my skill, he deflected my katana with his blade and buried the knife to the hilt in my side.

  That hurt.

  “That’s for the gut quip, Specialist,” he snarked, and he produced a second knife, identical to the first. This wasn’t going to end well. “Are you going to run home to mummy? Watch us sack your litt
le island, put it to the torch, and carry off Kojima’s head on a pike? Or are you going to work for me? Everyone has a price, Rikimaru. What does your loyalty cost?”

  At the end of the north bridge, movement caught my eye. A new group marched down the highway, a standard bearer with the fanged catfish leading the way. The Onamazu pikemen lowered their spears into a deadly thicket, trapping the host on the bridges.

  Gaunt couldn’t be allowed to ruin my tiny patch of order in a sea of chaos.

  Everyone had a place, everyone in his place, and my place was out in front, protecting my people from the likes of Stephen Gaunt.

  “Final protective fire now,” I ordered. The explosions began at the north end, sundering the bridge supports, dropping girders, asphalt, wrecked vehicles, and his troops 150 feet into the rocks and ocean below. Gaunt had just enough time to give me a strange look of approval that said, “well played,” as the last demolition charges blew. We plummeted into the frigid ocean water, and I lost consciousness.

  * * * * *

  Jamie Ibson Bio

  Jamie Ibson is a new writer, originally from Ontario but now living in Western Canada. After joining the Canadian army reserves in high school, he spent half of 2001 in Bosnia as a peacekeeper and came home with a new appreciation for how amazing a place North America really is. After graduating college, he landed a job in law enforcement and has been posted to Canada’s west coast since 2007. His first stories were published in 2018 with more to come in 2019 and beyond. His website can be found at https://ibsonwrites.ca, he is married to the lovely Michelle, and they have cats.

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