Ashes (23 page)

The dark-eyed boy's name was Chris Prentiss, but his friend, Peter, was in charge of men who were, with few exceptions, old enough to be grandparents.

“I don't care about the damn dogs. We don't know that it's not a trap.” Peter didn't look much older than Tom and had a tumble of wheat-brown hair that fell to his muscular shoulders. “She could be luring us, man.”

“I'm not,” she said. They'd marched her back, under guard, behind the semi, and she now sat cross-legged in a wagon. They'd taken her pack, and one of them might have her Glock, but she wasn't sure. The puppy curled in her lap, its ears lifting anxiously as Chris and Peter argued. When they'd nudged her into the wagon, the shepherd had sprung up after to lie quietly by her side, as Mina had done. “Aren't the dogs supposed to know?”

Peter's face flashed with annoyance. “Could be early yet. You still might change. Anyway, the dogs won't know if you're telling the truth about this other guy. We go out there, you've got an ambush set up, and there go a wagon, horses, weapons …”

“I think the risk is worth it,” Chris said. He was the quiet one, the observer, and Alex thought he was about her age, maybe a year older. “We need someone like him. He's a soldier; he knows
bombs
. You're always saying—”

“I know what I'm always saying.” Fuming, Peter planted his hands on his hips. “Okay. But we wait until morning.”

“That's too long,” she said.

Peter fired a warning glance. “I don't think I'm asking you. But if you want to march on out of here, fine by me.”

“Peter,” said Chris in his calm, patient way. “You know we can't let her leave.”

Alex wasn't sure she liked the sound of that. On the other hand, she wasn't particularly anxious to face that mob again. “Look,” she said to Peter, “I've been out there all day. We're not talking zombie hordes.”

“I'm sorry, but you don't know
what
you're talking about,” said Chris. His tone didn't change, but she heard the rebuke. “You're lucky to be alive. Three attacked you, and you said one had a club. That's new. Even though they didn't coordinate their attack, they've never really
hunted
together before either.” Chris looked at Peter. “Could be a first step toward them getting organized.”

“All the more reason to get Tom now,” she said.

“If he isn't dead yet,” Peter said.

“You keep saying that, he will be. Is that what you want?”

Peter scowled. “Of course not. I'm not an asshole. I'm just saying that you're really lucky. If you'd been caught farther out from town when it got dark, you might not be sitting here.”

In case they hadn't noticed, a bunch of old people had nearly lynched her, so she hadn't exactly been safe close to town either. “Is that why you've got the roadblocks? To keep out those brain-zapped kids?”

“Brain-zapped.” Peter barked a humorless laugh. “I like that. We call them the Changed. But yeah, that perimeter's one of the reasons they're not walking down Main Street.”

But a perimeter couldn't be the only reason, Alex figured. Short of building a fence, how did you secure an entire village?

“What sucks,” Peter continued, “is that they've figured out how to survive. They know to get warm, they know to find shelter; they follow people. From what you said, it sounds like they're learning how to really hunt.”

“So maybe they'll kill each other,” Alex said.

Peter shook his head. “They don't, which completely blows. Right now, they're not organized enough to overrun the town. They might get there, though, and then we're screwed. There are way more of them than we got bullets for.”

She wasn't giving up on Tom. “You have all these people. You've got guns. With the horses, you could get to Tom in a couple of hours. If one of you were hurt, you'd go after him, wouldn't you?”

“I'm not doing hypotheticals,” said Peter. “Look, I understand. You care about this guy. I get that. He sounds like he was a pretty good guy.”

“He is,” she said, her eyes filling. “He
is
.”

“Peter,” Chris said quietly, “I say we go after him. It's not like there are a lot of us. If we don't fight for each other, who will? If he's Spared, then it's worth the risk.”

Alex heard the emphasis:
Spared
. Like
Changed.
These people didn't see Tom or her or even themselves as
survivors.
They were
Spared
, like people who'd escaped some sort of wrath-of-God thing.

“Damn it,” said Peter. He scuffed snow with the heel of his boot, and Alex smelled the peppery edge of his resistance ease. “All right. But you stay behind, Chris.”

Alex didn't like the sound of that either—not because Chris was such an ally, but because Peter already didn't like her. So if there was a little accident …

Chris apparently felt the same way. “I don't think that's a good idea.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's just it. You're not
thinking
,” Peter snapped. “But I
am
, and I do not want to explain to the Rev or the Council why the hell you're dead and I'm not.”

A splinter of ice stabbed the dark mist of Chris's scent. No hint of anger crossed his face; there was nothing to betray him except his scent. Chris may have been only a little older than Alex, but he was very calm, a lot like Tom in some ways, and Alex thought she understood why Chris's scent was so … what was the word?
Dark.
Not evil, but shadowy, as if Chris knew how to hide. Maybe he'd dealt with people about to go nuclear his whole life.

“My grandfather is not here,” Chris said evenly. “The Council of Five is not here. It's just us, Peter, and the deal is we watch each other's back. So I'm coming.”

The two stared at each other a long moment, and then Peter gave a curt nod. “Fine. If we're lucky, we can be there a couple hours before dawn. Now excuse me while I go sell the others on this crazy scheme.”

After he'd stomped off, she said to Chris, “Thank you.”

“You're welcome,” he said, but he did not smile and his scent thickened, folding him in darkness again. “But I didn't do it for you.”

“And if Peter told you to put a bullet in my head?”

“I don't think you want to go there,” he said.

They were eight altogether. Two men on horseback flanked either side of the wagon, Peter rode point, and another man brought up the rear. Chris handled the wagon, and Alex sat between him and Jet. The puppy curled in a knot in her lap.

“Nice pup,” Chris said.

“What?” Everything was so
loud
: the creak of the wagon, the jangle of traces, the heavy clop of horses' hooves. After days of skulking around, hiding in the woods, and nearly jumping out of her skin every time a branch cracked, she was a little freaked out by the noise.

“Your pup. Don't see too many Weimies around here.”

“Weimies?”

“Weimaraners. He's going to be one big dog when he grows up. If I'm not wrong, he's going to be a ghost, too.” At her confused look, one corner of his mouth lifted in a half-grin. “You don't know much about dogs, do you?”

Other than that they suddenly like me?
“Never had one.”

“It's the color of his coat. They call those kind of Weimies ‘gray ghosts.' He got a name?”

“I haven't had time.” She looked down at the dog. “I like Ghost.”

“Good a name as any. You'll have to let our vet give him the once-over before we can let you keep him, though.”

“You've got a vet?”

“Yeah, and we could use a couple more. We've got a lot of livestock and, of course, all the dogs. We get a lot of people headed this way, so a vet'll eventually come through.”

She remembered the argument about Tom:
We need him.
“That what you were doing back at the roadblock? Weeding people out?”

“Uh-huh.”

“You don't sound sorry about it.”

Even in that queer moonlight, Chris's eyes and hair were as dark as his scent. “It's necessary.”

“How can you turn people away?”

“We do what we have to. We don't have unlimited supplies. Whether you get to stay depends on what you bring to the table.”

“That's pretty harsh.”

“Yes, it is. But there's only so much food to go around, and we have to balance who we bring in with what we need. Right now, we need people for labor, tending to the animals, and general upkeep. We need guys to man the perimeter. Come spring, there will be fields to till and plant, so we might let in more—if people are still coming, that is.”

“Who decides? Peter?”

“No. The Council of Five.”

“Like”—she frowned—“a town council?”

He shook his head. “More like, you know, elders.”

She almost laughed. “Nearly everybody's an elder.”

“Except for us, yeah. But these guys have family ties that go way, way back. The Reverend's family—the Yeagers—pretty much started Rule from the ground up, and a Yeager's always been the head of the Council. As I understand it, the Council of Five has been in charge of Rule for a long time.”

Something dinged. “Peter said the Reverend is your grandfather. But your last name is Prentiss.”

“That's right. Growing up, I never saw my grandfather.”

“So you didn't live here before?”

She sensed a sudden wariness, a reserve that reeked of secrets and shame, and his scent got even darker. “No. I'm from Merton, about sixty miles southeast. You?”

“Evanston, Illinois. A couple blocks from Northwestern.”

A flicker of something like amusement. “I'd just applied to Northwestern. Wasn't my first choice.”

Okay, so he was a senior, either seventeen or, more likely, eighteen. “What was?”

“Doesn't really matter now, does it?”

Ouch.
She felt the barrier slam down and decided there was no answer to that. Instead, she watched a knot of clouds scud over the face of that alien moon. Snuffling, the puppy burrowed deeper into her lap.

Chris said, “Sorry. It's just that I don't like looking back. No point. It's all dead anyway.”

“How do you know that?”

“We scrounged up an old radio, the kind that still works.”

Her pulse skipped. Harlan and Brett had taken the ranger radio when they'd stolen the truck. “Where did you find it?”

Maybe he heard something in her tone, because he flicked a curious glance. “Farm about ten miles out of town.”

“Oh.” She worked at keeping the disappointment out of her voice. “Have you heard a lot of broadcasts?”

“Not tons, and even less as time's gone on. Enough to know it's a mess out there.” He paused. “Where were you when it happened?”

She gave him the bare minimum: the mountain, Jack, Ellie. He didn't ask why she was in the Waucamaw or about her parents, and she saw no reason to volunteer the information. “What about you?” she asked.

“School. I was outside, helping the chemistry teacher set off a smoke bomb for the sophomores. She just dropped. I thought at first she'd fainted, but she was gone.”

“What did you do?”

“Before or after the plane crashed in the football field?”

“After.”

“I nearly beat a kid to death with a textbook. It was either that or he was going to take my face off. There was this other girl in the group. She was still okay—not Changed—only she freaked out and took off for the playground where there were all these kids. Most of them hadn't Changed. Some had, though, and they were going after the others.”

“Oh my God.” She didn't even want to imagine that.

“Then these five football jocks spotted her. Plowed right into that playground and tore that girl apart, and after that, they started in on the little ones.” He paused again. “I still see it sometimes when I close my eyes. Hear it. The whole freaking mess.”

“What did you do?”

“Not what I thought I would,” he said. “I ran.”

They rode in silence for a while and then she asked, “How did you end up in Rule? Because of your grandfather?”

He shook his head. “My car wouldn't start. Home was twenty-five miles away, and Merton's a big town. After what I saw at the school, I figured it would be five hundred times worse there. All those people dead or getting killed or going crazy. No point.”

“But it was still home.”

“There was just me and my dad.” The shadows in Chris's scent thickened, and Alex thought that his father was someone Chris didn't like thinking about. “Now that we understand more—how old the people who dropped were—I know there wouldn't have been any point. He was fifty.”

“But you couldn't have known that then, and there have to be exceptions. Look at us.”

“We only prove the rule. As near as we can tell, the majority of normal people walking around are either really young or pushing sixty-five or seventy on up.”

“Oh.” She cast about for something to say. “Well, your father would want you to save yourself. He wouldn't want you dead.”

The corner of his mouth lifted again. “You didn't know my dad.”

She didn't know what to say to that either. “How many of
us
are there?”

“In Rule? Well, we've got about five hundred people total. Out of those, sixty-three are Spared.”

“Sixty-three kids out of five hundred people?”

“That's right. Only twenty-five kids are our age: twelve guys, thirteen girls.” He measured her with a look. “Fourteen, now.”

“Only
twenty-five
?”

“Uh-huh. Peter's the oldest Spared; he's twenty-four.” He hesitated. “He's actually a pretty good guy once you get to know him.”

She'd reserve judgment on that. “How does anyone know we won't change? Maybe it's just a matter of time, like Peter said.” She thought about Deidre. “Have any of the younger kids Changed since the Zap?”

“Never quite gotten that far.”

She didn't understand. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, we don't let things get that far.” In the moonlight, his face was nothing more than a glimmer. “Why do you think we have the dogs?”

An early warning system, she realized: like canaries in a mine, the dogs must sense the change before it happened. Still, she couldn't believe it. “You decide about a kid on the basis of what a
dog
thinks?”

“They haven't been wrong yet.”

Meaning these people had experience. My God, had they locked the kids up and watched them change? Like an experiment, just to make sure? They must have, or else they wouldn't have such faith in the dogs.

A wave of unreality washed over her, leaving her shaky and ill.
The dogs finger kids, and then these people … what do they do? Kick the kids out of town?
Kill
them?
She thought back to those three kids, the girl with her club and those two boys. Until that moment, she hadn't dwelled on them much. She'd been too busy trying to keep Tom alive and then fending off a mob, and there really was no point, to borrow a phrase. What she'd done had been self-defense. She'd had no choice.

“We do what we have to in order to survive,” Chris said quietly. “When you've been here awhile, you'll understand.”

The hell of it was: in a way, she already did.