Ashes, Ashes Read online

  He looked at her, taking in her expression. He let go of her arm. “Oh, so you’re happy, right? You’re having fun hiding from everyone, playing survivor out here with the dogs, eating frogs and acorns, being cold and wet or hot and itchy? Bathing once every few months?” His voice was scathing. His nose wrinkled, and once again she became aware of the smell wafting from her grimy clothes and her hair, which must resemble a bird’s nest.

  Her face reddened.

  “I’m not leaving here.”

  “The Sweepers will find you sooner or later.”

  “I thought they were just looking for diseased people. Or the S’ans?”

  Aidan shook his head. “No. Now they’re looking for whoever they can find. And who’s to say the plague won’t come back again? Another wave that’ll take out more survivors? Maybe it’s breeding in the sewers. In the rats. Or in the birds again.”

  She pressed her lips together. “Sounds like a good reason to stay away from people.”

  “Nothing will get rebuilt without people,” he said.

  “People”—she put a snotty emphasis on the word—“are the reason we’re in this mess in the first place. Too many people, and most of them are a waste of oxygen.”

  She glared at the tree limb, dug her fingers into the cracks in the bark. He snorted. She could just tell without looking that his mouth was twisted in a sneer again. She felt heat flood the back of her neck. What a jerk!

  “The waters are rising,” he said. “Every season, they creep a little higher. You can tell by Alice.”

  She looked at him uncomprehendingly.

  “The Alice statue. Isn’t that how you keep track of the lake levels?”

  “How did you know about that?” She tightened her hold on her knife. “You have been watching me!”

  He rolled his eyes. “You don’t own the park, you know. It’s not yours.”

  Eyeing him suspiciously, she thought about what he had said.

  Alice! That was the name of the girl sitting on the mushroom. Now that she heard it again she had no idea how she could have forgotten. She’d seen the animated movie, and her mother had read the book to her, stopping when it gave Lucy nightmares about having her head chopped off. There were so many things she had forgotten or blocked out, as if she couldn’t help squashing down all the memories with the ones that hurt still. She stared at the tower. And then at the water, knowing that what Aidan said was true. The rains would come again with staggering ferocity like something out of the Bible; the oceans would swell, devouring the new brittle edges of coastline; rivers would spill over; and the lakes would grow until they swallowed the land. They were due for something big and devastating, she could feel it. Locusts, maybe.

  “Where do you live?” Lucy asked, shrugging the crawling feeling from between her shoulder blades.

  He turned to look at her, one hand rumpling his shaggy hair until it stuck out in all directions. The smirk was gone. He pointed into the darkness. “See?”

  She shook her head.

  He grabbed her shoulder, turned her a few degrees to the east. Past the hollow where her camp was, a tall silhouette loomed. She recognized the Egyptian-style marble column which stood there, as out of place as a camel, and to the northeast of it a plateau and a series of gorges where a massive earthquake had caused the concrete slabs of a big road to slide and sink and bunch upward like a swathe of gray ribbon.

  Aidan pointed with his finger, and she followed the invisible path with her eyes. “See the plateau? If you keep going across the escarpment about three or four miles as the crow flies, you’ll come to the canals. It’s pretty hard going.” She could just make out the slender silhouettes of rope bridges slung like webs above the cement-veined crevasses, and clusters of stilt houses sticking up along the slopes like bunches of strange flowers.

  “There,” he said, stabbing the air with his finger, “the Hell Gate.” He sounded proud and embarrassed at the same time. “The camp was actually part of Wards Island before the floods.”

  “What’s with the name?” she asked, thinking it sounded overly dramatic. “I thought the Hell Gate was a bridge or something?”

  “We adopted it because it seemed appropriate.”

  “Sounds homey,” she said sarcastically.

  A dog howled suddenly from outside the thicket. Under their tree the pack lurched to its feet, barking raucously. The howl came again, a long, sustained cry like a signal of some kind, and the pack, jostling one another and snapping at the air, scrambled about in excitement, tearing up the mossy ground with their thick claws. Lucy tracked them as they milled and broke apart, never moving more than a few yards away from the tree. Something had gotten them riled up again. She sensed his eyes on her.

  “You can’t just hide in your hollow like a mouse.”

  She stared at him. “I’m not hiding,” she snapped. “I’m surviving. And I’ve been doing just fine on my own.”

  His gaze flicked away. She felt him tense beside her.

  “Those are not feral dogs,” he said. “They’re hunting dogs.”

  “So what are they hunting?”

  “Well, I’m pretty sure it’s not me. They didn’t appear until you did. They’re trackers. They’re looking for something.”

  She felt her jaw drop open. “What do you mean?” Her voice was a croak. “What are they looking for?”

  “I don’t know exactly.” He frowned. “But something makes them go crazy. I’ve watched them before,” he said. “They’re sent out from the Compound. I’ve seen them around, out on the Great Hill, on the Cliff, in the Hell Gate, down in the Village. They go out, they find people who are hiding, and then the Sweepers come.”

  She blinked. Her brain felt fuzzy. Her knife was in her hand again. It felt clumsy in her hand, as if she couldn’t will her fingers to hold it properly.

  “So they’re just keeping us here until …”

  “Until the Sweepers arrive.”

  “How did the dogs know?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “I guess they smelled you.”

  She shot a swift glance at him, but he wasn’t smirking. His eyebrows were drawn across his forehead and one hand raked through his hair.

  She judged the jump to the ground. Maybe she could push off from a branch before dropping, get some distance from the dogs before running. She thought there were maybe a couple of dozen of them. And more beyond her sight, out there in the gloom with the dog that had howled the announcement of their location. She squinted into the gathering darkness, straining to see a sign that the Sweepers were coming. Could she kill a dog? If she had to. But would that stop the others? Or would the blood drive them into a killing frenzy?

  “Give me that bandanna,” he said, pointing to her wounded hand.

  “Why?”

  “Come on!” He made an impatient gesture when she remained frozen. She held out her arm and he untied the knot from the bandage. Dark, fresh blood clotted the blue and white paisley design, and there were older, rusty stains where it had dried. He shoved it in the back pocket of his jeans and pulled two large, smooth rocks and a slingshot from the pouch of his sweatshirt. “Stay here until they’re gone, then run as fast as you can,” he said.

  “What are you going to do?”

  He grinned, his teeth very white.

  The dogs were huddled beneath the tree in a solid mass of resting bodies. Aidan fitted a rock into the rubber pocket of his sling and then drew it back between two fingers. The stone whistled through the air, hitting the trunk of a tree at the edge of the grove with a sharp thunk. Furry heads came up, and the dogs bolted toward the sound. He quickly aimed and shot the second rock at a tree farther on, and then, with one easy motion, swung out from the branch catching the limb below him. Quickly he made his way down before Lucy could even gasp out a word. He jumped the last ten feet, landing softly on his feet. The bandanna was out and in his hand, and he ran in the opposite direction from the pack, ducking every few feet to trail the material along the ground. Once
he’d cleared the woods, he stopped and turned. He stood for a moment at the top of a small grassy hill, and then a wild, almost joyful cry burst from his lips. It rang through the trees and was answered by the dogs. Outlined against the sky, he raised the bandanna like a flag and waved it. He whooped and hollered. Lucy watched him disappear toward the lake. A chorus of barks rang out, and then the pack rushed back in a boiling frenzy. The small black-and-white terrier she had noticed before fought to get to the front. Its nose was down to the ground, a steady whine rising from its throat, its stump of a tail wagging furiously. It sent up an excited yapping, which was echoed almost immediately by another chorus of mad barks, and the small dog sped away. The other dogs hurtled after it, shoulder to shoulder in a melee of bristling fur, passing underneath her tree and onward in the direction the boy had taken.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE TIME BEFORE

  Lucy half climbed, half fell out of the tree. Her knees were shaking and her muscles felt stiff and cold. Her hand was sore and so caked with congealed blood that she could barely close her fingers. She clambered backward until she reached the crotch of the tree, grabbed hold of a branch, and slipped, wrenching her shoulder. Her feet skidded against the wet bark. Her heart in her mouth, Lucy inched her way down, staring fixedly at her boots and letting the ground fuzz out at the edges of her vision. Any hope she had of natural coordination abandoned her, and the memory of Aidan’s confidence frayed her nerves even more. She dropped the last twelve feet gracelessly, slithering down against the trunk and scraping the side of her left arm and the length of her ribs against the bark. She came down hard on one foot, jarring her ankle.

  By the time she had hobbled all the way to the clearing that surrounded her camp, she was panting and hunched over. Her ankle had swollen like a golf ball; her hair was glued to her face by a combination of sweat and moist air. Every shadow cast by the moon, every whisper in the grasses, sent a surge of panic through her body. So much adrenaline was coursing through her that she felt physically sick with it.

  But there had been no sign of the Sweepers, no sign of the dogs beyond the occasional echoing howl carried over the mudflats from the lake. Lucy stopped in the middle of a barren patch of ground where she could see in all directions and listened hard, forcing her breathing to slow so she could pay attention. Would she hear if Aidan was being torn to pieces? Could she tell if the dogs had caught up to him? A lone insect stilled its buzz-saw melody as she slowly turned in a circle. There was no other sound.

  The night wrapped around her, and with a soft sigh the rain began to fall again, passing from sprinkle to gushing torrent in a few seconds. She moved forward at a jog, then an all-out run, frantic suddenly to reach the shelter of her camp. But then she paused, fiercely reminding herself to be cautious and check the silhouetted hummocks. She added them up and felt her heartbeat calm. Twenty-three hunched shapes, and that one fallen tree stump that looked like the curved back of a breaching whale—everything as usual. Lucy started forward again. It was impossible to move quietly. The ground was covered in puddles, some treacherously deep. She splashed forward, hands out in case she fell on the slippery grass, muddy streams on either side of her feet. Around the circumference of her camp, barely twenty yards from her concealed front door, dozens of paw prints were gouged into the wet soil.

  Casting one final look around, she bolted the last ten feet to her door, ignoring the pain in her ankle. She dragged the willow screen aside and ducked inside. Her shelter was smoke-filled and thick with the briny smell of stewing turtle. She pulled her sweatshirt sleeve over her hand, picked up the pot by the scalding handle, and moved it from the smoldering fire, setting it on the ground. She raked the meager embers with a stick and added the last of the wood to the pile, then sank down, holding her hands out to the pitiful warmth. She was soaking wet. Her waterlogged sweatshirt dragged at her body; her filthy jeans were pasted to her legs. Her toes squelched in the two inches of water inside her boots, and she could smell the stink of her sodden socks even without taking her boots off. Her hands shook, and then the tremors traveled swiftly up her arms and down her spine. She knew the smart thing would be to strip, dry herself off as best she could, and then put on a change of clothing, but she was too exhausted to do more than stare at the flames and shiver. Her fingers were slathered with mud and blood and covered in scratches. Her whole left side, where she had fallen from the tree, felt bruised and raw. She peeled her sweatshirt and tank top up. Furrows of skin were scraped from her ribs and along her forearm. Her shoulder was bruised; purple bloomed above the bone. Lucy looked at her upper arm: smooth, unblemished except for four freckles set in a line as if someone had pierced her with the tines of a fork. No scars. She pulled her shirts back down, gasping as the cold, wet material touched her body. She wrapped her arms around her chest and rocked back and forth, slitting her eyes against the tendrils of smoke that wreathed the floor.

  The rain pounded the branches above her. Occasionally a drop would force its way through the densely woven wood and fall on her head. She had a plastic tarp she could sleep under, but it was splotched with mildew and it crackled and rustled and slid away from her sleeping bag. She always had nightmares when she used it, waking in a confused tangle and feeling as if she were being suffocated.

  Seeing another person, talking to Aidan, had thrown Lucy off balance. She was perfectly fine living on her own, relying on no one else, but she’d almost forgotten that there were other people out there. It was easier if she could pretend that she was the only survivor. Then her mind was completely occupied with foraging and hunting and all the small problems she had to solve, and she’d crawl into her sleeping bag at the end of another long day with no troubling thoughts. But now she was remembering how things used to be, and it was almost like a part of her, the human part, which was social and—she hated to admit it—craved conversation and interaction, had awoken again.

  Lucy hobbled over to her backpack, unbuckled it, and pulled it open. She pushed her hands down to the very bottom, letting her fingers dance over her flint and tinderbox, her journal, a dead flashlight, her transistor radio, one last precious book of matches, until she felt the smooth leather cover. She hardly knew why she had kept it when so much of her life before was strewn in piles on the floor of her New Jersey home. The last weeks there were a blur in which only endless phone conversations with her parents’ doctors and the countless forms to be signed stood out in her memory. A jumble of decisions were made while she could scarcely remember her own name, until at last the bodies were packed into the ambulance and taken away, leaving a silence that felt heavy and buzzed in her ears. She’d scanned her mother’s phone book, called women she remembered as being kind, but the phone rang and rang and no one ever picked up. And after that the house was almost unbearable, and the neighborhood she’d grown up in felt empty and forlorn, like a ghost town. She had become increasingly nervous, jumping at sounds, scared of the lights that came on in the adjacent houses in the middle of the night, the strange, silent men in hazard suiting who seemed to be looking for something, the white vans they drove. Lucy had taken to sleeping on the cold linoleum floor in the mudroom, which had no windows but did have a door that double-bolted and let out into the yard with its thick screen of cedar hedges. She’d listened to reports on the solar-powered radio her dad had kept on a shelf by the cellar door with stubs of emergency candles and freeze-dried camping meals. The college stations she was familiar with were not transmitting, and one by one the big news stations stopped, until finally there’d been nothing but a pirate channel, fuzzy and frustrating to pick up strongly. But in the early days, she’d lie on an inflatable mattress with the radio pressed to her ear, happy to be hearing another human voice. The host, who called himself Typhoid Harry, had been the first and only person to explain the plague in words she could understand. From him she’d learned that most people had contracted the plague in the first wave of contagion. Out of every one million people, 999,999 had died. Most of the sur
vivors were picked off by the second wave. However, there were a scant few who seemed protected by the routine childhood vaccine given out with those for chicken pox, measles, polio, and bird flu, and an even fewer number who somehow survived the disease, horribly scarred and insane—the S’ans.

  On the day she’d left for good, she’d run from room to room, breathless, crying jagged sobs that hurt her chest, careful not to look at too much, but becoming transfixed by the sights of her mother’s faded dressing gown still hanging on its hook on the bedroom door, her shawl draped on her favorite armchair, her father’s coffee mug on the draining board in the kitchen. She’d spent most of the time in her dad’s home office searching for she didn’t know what, catching the lingering scent of his aftershave, and finding the hunting knife and sheath in the bottom drawer of the desk.

  Lucy had taken the knife not so much for defense. At that point everything was odd, surreal, but she had no notion of any physical danger to herself. She’d slipped it into her bag with her mother’s shawl, a box of assorted freeze-dried food, and a bottle of spring water, because it was so unlike her father to own a weapon. He was all about leather attachés and legal briefs and dark, perfectly pressed suits. It was a puzzle to be gnawed on.

  And she had taken her tenth-grade yearbook, too, even though she’d hated school, never infiltrating the groups of popular kids. The yearbook was a superficial slice of high school life that completely ignored the pain and boredom of it. She couldn’t help thinking that Aidan would have fit in perfectly at her school, although she had to admit there was an edge to him that was different from the preppy, stuck-up boys she used to have classes with.

  She opened the yearbook. The blank pages in front and back were empty of those insipid Have a great summer! messages. Inside she’d scrawled over pictures of the hair-sprayed, shiny lip-glossed, made-up girls in her class with a big, thick, black pen, giving them punk hairdos and raccoon eyes and thought bubbles that said stuff like “Do you think I’m pretty?” Somehow their deaths had changed it all. The yearbook touched on the life before. It had become something to remind her that things had been normal once.