Ashes (6 page)

The tent had burned and melted at the same time. What was left clung in cold, hard, black ash clots to scorched aluminum poles, like petrified meat on the fossilized ribs of a prehistoric dinosaur. An overturned cookpot vomited a coagulated brown spew that had slopped over the stones ringing the fire pit and seeped into the dirt. A murder of crows hopped around a scatter of their fallen kind, and as Alex watched, one leaned over, stabbed with a very black beak at a dead woodpecker, and came up with something blue and stringy that it tossed back into its maw with a snap.

Next to the cold fire pit were two people: a girl and a boy. The girl was blonde and wore a powder-blue sweatshirt with the words
SOMERVILLE HIGH
and a tennis racket stenciled in white.

Oh my God. She
knew
this girl. Where? Yes, when she'd stopped to gas up and call Aunt Hannah.

The girl was Ponytail Blonde.

She didn't recognize the boy, although he'd probably been on the same bus. He was reedy, mostly legs with a platform for a head. His sweatshirt, also light blue with the same lettering, featured a basketball.

In another life, they might have been a couple, having a picnic.

Except these kids weren't munching sandwiches.

There was also a woman, a grandmotherly sort who lay flat on the ground, head thrown back, mouth unhinged. A pair of eyeglasses on a keeper chain dragged in the dirt. Judging from the dried rills of blood on her right cheek, that eye was gone.

So was her throat.

The skin was ripped, the knobby tube of her windpipe slopping out like a fleshy tapeworm. The blood—and there had been a lot of it—had dried to rust in a wide bib over the woman's chest. From the way her hands were clawed, Alex thought she'd been clutching her belly when she died. Hadn't done the woman any good either, judging from the way her guts boiled out in a dusky, desiccated tangle, like limp spaghetti.

The boy and girl were eating. Stuffing their faces, actually. Splashes of blood smeared their mouths and dripped over their chins like runny clown's makeup. With a grunt, the boy plunged his fist into the woman's abdomen and rooted around before coming back up with a drippy fistful of something liverish and soft enough that Alex could hear the squelch as the meaty thing oozed between his fists.

Oh. My. God.
Alex felt the low moan begin in her chest and clapped a hand to her mouth to stopper it back up. Her vision bloomed with black roses, and she felt her head going a little swimmy.

Squealing, Ponytail Blonde made a grab for her companion's tasty treat, but Basketball Boy let out a warning grunt and batted her hands away. Pouting—
yes
, Alex thought crazily,
she's pissed
—Ponytail Blonde tossed her head hard enough to make her filthy hair dance. Then, turning away from the boy, the girl jabbed with two stiff fingers and gouged out the woman's left eye. She gave the slick, bloody globe a triumphant wave, as if taunting her basketball-playing boyfriend, but he paid no attention and kept chowing down on whatever it was he'd pulled out. With another toss of her head, Ponytail Blonde popped the eye into her mouth like a grape.

At that, Ellie let out a very tiny—but very distinct—squeak.

Alex's heart tried to blast right out of her chest.
Ellie, no, shut up, shu—

The boy and the girl went still.

No, no, no …
Alex watched in a kind of sick free fall of terror as Ponytail Blonde stiffened and then lifted her nose and sniffed. Testing the air, checking for intruders, trying to catch a scent—Alex understood that at once. After all,
she
smelled
them
, the dead woman, the burned tent, Ellie's fear.

She and Ellie needed to get out of here, maybe make a run for it. There was enough light to see the trail. If she just flat-out dug in and
ran
, she might outdistance them. Alex had endurance; she was still shaky from this morning, but thank God, she was months out from chemo and strong enough. Except these kids were once athletes and they were acting like, well, animals.
Real
animals. So they were probably pretty fast, and even if Alex could get away, she didn't think Ellie could.

She realized then that her hand had strayed to her Glock and thumbed away the retaining strap without her being aware at all. Could she do that? She'd only shot at targets, never anything alive, and her conscious mind balked:
No, they're kids; they're my age. There's no way I can just
shoot
them.

In the end, she never had to find out.

A crow saved them. Emboldened by the lack of reaction to its presence, the crow—very large and very stupid—decided to try its luck. It hopped up to Basketball Boy, hesitated, and then snatched at a stray lump of the liverish meat that had tumbled to the dirt.

Quick as a snake, the boy seized the crow by the neck. The crow let out a huge squawk of surprise. At the sound, the rest of the crows—the entire murder—lifted into the air in a squalling black mass. Distracted, Ponytail Blonde whirled around as the boy wrestled with the struggling crow. The crow was very strong, and it twisted, slashing at the boy's face with its claws. Gargling in pain, Basketball Boy let go. The crow tumbled from his fists in a cloud of torn feathers. One wing was crooked, but the crow was moving fast, hopping away and pulling at the air with its one good wing.

It almost got away.

Spinning on her heel, Ponytail Blonde lunged as if sprinting for a crosscourt volley. She was, Alex saw now, wicked fast.

The bird began to scream in huge, raucous squawks. Ponytail Blonde bawled with excitement.

“Go,” Alex said to Ellie in a low, urgent whisper. “Don't look back; just go, go, go for the trail and keep running!”

Without a word, Ellie scurried away, crashing through the underbrush so loudly that Alex cringed. Hand still on her Glock, she shot an anxious look over her shoulder, but either the crow's shrieks drowned out the sound of Ellie's flight or Ponytail Blonde was having way too much fun.

The girl clamped her hands around the animal's neck and gave a savage twist. The crow's neck snapped with a crisp, crackling sound like a Thanksgiving wishbone, and then Ponytail Blonde corkscrewed the crow's head from its body with a gleeful squall.

Alex didn't wait to see any more. She turned and fled.

“Alex?”

“Mmm?”

“Are we going to be okay?”

“Sure.” Alex hugged the girl closer, not out of affection but expediency. The less space between them, the warmer they'd be. Beneath them, their nest of leaves and debris crackled with a sound like dry cellophane. The debris shelter was warm, almost toasty from their body heat—captured as it was in a thick, three-foot mound of leaf litter. “We'll be fine. Couple more days and we'll be at the rangers. They'll know what to do.”

They'd run as the sky fired with a startling, blood-red sunset, one that made Alex think of that really famous painting where the guy was standing on a bridge and screaming. They'd kept on running as that weird light faded, and then they'd run some more, stumbling on by flashlight until the only scents Alex picked up were of the forest and themselves. By then, with the moon not yet risen, the woods were black, and the going too treacherous for them to continue.

Ellie hadn't wanted to eat. Really, Alex didn't much blame her; she was pretty queasy, too—almost chemo-queasy—and wrung-out from the accumulated horrors of this terrible day. Clutching her useless iPod, Ellie watched as Alex threw together a debris shelter using pine boughs and deadfall. Somewhere along the way, the girl had vomited, and Alex used her shirt to get rid of the worst of the muck on Ellie's face and parka. She managed to coax the kid into chewing the moist inner bark of a thin twig of white pine:
It tastes like a sugar lemon drop, Ellie. Honest.
Pines were famine food, too; the Ojibwa used to pound the dried pulp into flour, and Alex briefly considered then abandoned the idea. They were so not sticking around any longer than they had to.

But they
would
be in a world of hurt if Alex couldn't find water, and soon. The stream was back the way they'd come, but there was no way she was retracing her steps, not with those kids out there. They just had to hope another stream intersected the trail, because, at this rate, the river was still three days out. Not good.

Now, Ellie asked, “What about food?”

“We've got Jell-O and the power bars.”

“But I ate one.”

“It's okay, Ellie. You were hungry, it's fine.”

“I
stole
it.”

She decided on a different tack. “When we get to the river, we'll fill up our water bottles and catch a couple fish.”

“But you said fishing would slow us down.”

“Well, not necessarily. If we're stronger, we'll move faster. You've got the rod and lures, right?”

“Uh-huh.” Ellie's voice was so drained of color it sounded transparent as glass.

“So we're set.”

“What if they're not biting?”

“They'll bite.” Then she thought of something. “Your grandpa took you out of school to go hiking, right? So when were you supposed to go back?”

“To school? Um … Tuesday.”

Today was Saturday. “Which means you'd have to get back on Monday, latest. So, is there anyone at your house?”

“Just Mrs. Pierce. She lives next door and takes in the mail and does stuff with the lights.”

“So there you go. If you guys don't show up by Monday, Mrs. Pierce will get worried. She'll probably phone the rangers at the park entrance or maybe the station. I wouldn't be surprised if the rangers know all about you by the time we get there.”

“Won't anyone worry about you?”

“Sure, but not for a while.” It occurred to her then that without her watch, she might easily lose track of the days. One more thing to worry about. Maybe notch a stick …

“What if Mrs. Pierce doesn't worry? What if it takes her a couple days?”

“Well, you worrying about her not worrying won't help. Don't sweat it. Come on, try to get some sleep.”

“I can't.” A rustle as Ellie squirmed. “These leaves are itchy.”

“Try.”

“But what if … what if that girl … what if they …?”

“They won't. It'll be okay.”

“But how do you know?”

“Because we ran a long time and they didn't come after us and now it's dark. If they were going to chase us, they'd have done that already.”

Pause. “Why were they doing that? Why were they—”

“I don't know.” Maybe the brain-zap made the kids go crazy, like the deer and the birds. But the birds were back to normal and so was Ellie, and
eating
people was way,
way
out there. Just thinking about it stroked gooseflesh from her skin and set her teeth. Had those kids
killed
that woman? They must have. She looked pretty old, like fifty or sixty, so between the two of them, taking her down might have been easy. Alex could almost see the movie in her mind, like one of those Animal Planet videos: the kids attacking, pouncing, swarming over the woman, tearing open her belly, ripping out her throat with their teeth.

God, just like animals.
She shuddered at the thought. And what was with that
stink
? It smelled like … she didn't know … roadkill, yeah, but it was a really
old
smell, too. No,
old
wasn't the right word either.

The kids smelled …
wild
. They
were
wild. They were like zombies—only alive instead of coming
back
to life. Or maybe they
had
died and then …? No, no, that couldn't be right. Could it? God, she didn't know. All she knew was
their
electronics had fried and so had their brains. The brain-zap hit them all: the animals and these kids and her and Ellie. Until now, she'd thought that she was the only one who'd changed—a stupid assumption, but she just hadn't had anything to go on. Hell, she'd never stopped to consider that the zap might cover a big area: not just the mountain but the valley, too. The mountain was, what, five miles back? So, if the zap was a circle, say, with a radius of five miles, square that and times pi and …

Oh my God
. Her breath caught. Eighty square
miles
? The Waucamaw was huge, almost four hundred square miles. If she was right, that zap hit a fifth of the wilderness—a lot of land. And how many people? This far north, the fall colors were past peak by a good week, which meant that tons of tourists already had come and gone.

And what was with those kids? They'd
changed
in a way that was different from her.

Or maybe not.
She remembered how Ponytail Blonde had tested the air.
What if their sense of smell sharpened, too? What if that's the first step?

Her restless mind strayed back to those gunshots. For the first time, she considered that maybe the question wasn't
what
those guys had been shooting at, but
who.

Was that going to happen to her? God, she'd put a bullet in her head first. But what if she didn't notice until it was too late? Worse, what if she didn't
want
to stop the change? What if she didn't care?

“Alex?” Ellie's voice floated out of the dark. “Is what happened to those kids going to happen to us?”

Hearing her thoughts come out of Ellie's mouth thoroughly creeped her out. “No,” Alex said automatically. “It's been too long. It would've happened already.”

Liar.
The voice was small, only an inner whisper misting through her mind.
You don't know anything for sure. You've changed, and you're still changing. You're smelling things—and you're smelling
meanings
. That zap was only this morning, and look how far you've come since then. Look how fast those kids changed. Maybe what happened to them hasn't caught up to you yet.

Go away, you.
She couldn't worry about this now. She didn't want to worry about it ever. All she wanted was to close her eyes and not dream at all; to wake up in her own bed and see that this was all a really bad nightmare or something.

“Come on,” she said, “go to sleep. We have a long day ahead of us tomorrow.”

“But I'm scared to go to sleep,” Ellie said. “What if I don't wake up like
me
?”

“We'll be okay.”

“How do you know? Maybe we're going to die.”

“No, we're not. Not today.” It was another automatic response, a little bit of the gallows humor—or reality—she'd adopted over the past two years. “And not tomorrow either.”

A pause. “I'm sorry about Mina. She wouldn't leave. I couldn't get her to come.”

“You did the best you could,” Alex said, though she doubted this was the case. The kid hated that dog.

“Do you think she'll be okay?”

“I don't know, Ellie. She seems like a pretty smart dog.”

“Maybe she'll go wild.”

“Maybe. I don't know how fast dogs go wild.”
If they're
starving, maybe very fast.
But that was her voice now, not this other whisper.

“Grandpa said there are lots of wild dogs in the Waucamaw already. He says that people leave them here because they think they're doing the dogs some big favor by setting them free, only a lot starve and the ones who don't go wild.”

“I don't think worrying about Mina will help.”

“Oh.” Silence. “I wish I could do it all over again.”

“Do what?”

“Everything. I wish I had been nicer to Grandpa,” Ellie whispered miserably. “I wish I'd been nicer to Mina. Maybe if I'd been better, my mommy wouldn't have gone away.”

She wasn't exactly sure what to say. “Your grandpa said your mom went away when you were really little. It couldn't have been anything you did. You were just a baby.”

“Maybe. Daddy had some pictures, but he didn't like looking at them because they made him sad.” Ellie was quiet a moment. “I don't even remember what Daddy looks like anymore. He's all blurry. He made me mad, too.”

“How come?”

“Because he went away when I told him not to. He said he had to because it was his job.”

Alex knew what this was like. “Sometimes when you're sad, it's easier to be angry.”

“Do you get mad at your parents?” asked Ellie.

Alex's throat balled. “All the time,” she said.

Ellie fell asleep not long after, but tired as she was, Alex couldn't relax. Her mind churned, and she was restless, jumpy, her legs a little herky-jerky. The feeling reminded her of the time Barrett tried a med that was supposed to make her not puke during chemo—Reglan, was it? She couldn't remember; she'd been through enough drugs over the past couple of years to keep a small army of pharmacists in business. The problem with meds was that even the ones that were supposed to take care of side effects
had
side effects. Like the way Reglan made her all twitchy, with a horrible, total-body sensation of ants swarming over her skin. So she'd been a total spaz
and
nauseous, which sucked.

The distant cry of a coyote came then, a sound like the squeal of a rusty hinge. Maybe she should keep watch. There were animals, after all, and those two brain-zapped cannibal kids. Who knew what—who—
they
might have in mind for dessert. Yeah, maybe a quick turn around their camp. Better than lying here, ready to jump out of her skin. Reaching for her Glock, which she'd taken off along with her fanny pack before bedding down, she winced at the sharp, harsh crackle of leaves, but Ellie didn't stir.

She cradled the gun. Its solidity was reassuring, and so was its scent: gun oil, the faint metallic char of burnt powder. The holster smelled like comfortable shoes mingling with just the tiniest whisper of sweat—a scent that was not hers; she knew that.

Oh, Dad, tell me what to do.
Her throat tightened. Would he understand if she had to use the gun? Would her mother? Because if Alex changed even more—if she got like those kids—she'd have to take control,
do
something before it was too late. Anyway, it wasn't like she'd never thought of suicide. Call her crazy, but suicide was a way of taking charge and fighting the monster, an alien invader she'd never thought of as remotely belonging to her in any way. Killing herself before
it
could finish its work was sticking her thumb in its eye, a way of depriving the monster of its final victory. Now, though, she and the monster might be inseparable, one and the same, and that changed everything.

I'll be the monster. If I use the gun, I won't be taking
it
out. I'll be killing
me.

Then she had another, even more horrible thought. What if she was all right, but
Ellie
changed? Could she shoot a little kid?

God, this was all so messed
up
! She burrowed out of the shelter fast, winking against the burn of tears. After the warmth of the shelter, the slap of the chilly forest air set her teeth, and she stood a few moments, shivering in the dark, her throat working. The rasp of her breaths seemed very loud, and she clapped a hand to her trembling lips to catch a sob.
Stop this, stop this!
She had to get ahold of herself. She had to deal. She was the only one who could. Ellie was just a little kid, so it was up to Alex to get them out of this. She just didn't have
time
to feel sorry for herself—