Bound to Ashes (The Altered Sequence Book 1) (11 page)

“Why not?”

Now that’s a good question. “It’s not like I do it on purpose.”

She laughs quietly. “I figured.” She looks like she has more to say, kind of zoning out and staring into space. Then she says with a start, “Sorry. Could you help me wake everyone up?”

I stand and watch her as she hops down and walks over to the other humans.

The air fogs around my breath. First day, first night: check. An eternity to go.

Back at the silo, there was a stream that ran off the orchard. The last of its kind. But the farther into this city we go, the fatter its river gets. An animosity grows in me at the sight of it—this city had to have a steady supply of water, when ours dried up. Maybe we were supposed to leave.

Alessandra steers us off path to replenish our water. The humans use weird white and blue tubes to suck the water into their containers. Purifiers, I guess. As I’m drinking the cool water, gritty with silt, Peregrine looks at me weirdly and says, “You drink it straight?”

“...Yeah.” We always have. The stream near the silo was pretty clean until it dried up. And the other water we drank was from huge jugs from water coolers, so I never really thought about how clean water is.

“Their immune systems are supercharged,” Alessandra says from downstream. She lifts up the water jugs she was refilling and caps them. Our attentions turn to her. “Pretty much neutralizes all harmful bacteria and viral infections.”

Ashton says casually, “Well, no. I got lockjaw once.”

I shiver. Don’t really want to think about that time.

“You did?” Alessandra says. “How do you know it was lockjaw?”

“I looked it up,” Ashton replies. “Took about two weeks to get over the muscle spasms,” he adds. He’s being so... casual about it. I try to look into his head and figure out why he’s telling them something like that.

“Two weeks?” Alessandra says. “Full recovery takes
months
with intensive care and treatment.”

Ashton casts his eyes away and shrugs. He tucks the water bottle back in his pack.

Alessandra just shakes her head like she can’t believe it, and I catch a glimpse of James scowling down the river. That’s all he ever does. This trip might be a lot easier without him looming over us all the time.

Lockjaw. Ashton, slumped against the silo walls, curling and flexing and bending all different ways, eyes clenched shut in pain. Like he was being tortured from the inside out. I rub my forehead. Can’t afford to dwell on that. Just
stop
.... Just look at Ashton now. Climbing the bank in one or two steps, not fleeing from anything, safe. Or at least the illusion of safe. With every backwards glance and awkward shuffle from one of the humans, my heart gets pumping, and my mind races trying to predict what they’re planning. But that’s all stupid paranoia, anyway. Probably. That’s the tricky thing about paranoia, you can never be sure if it’s justified or not. But I’m still just
waiting
for the humans to give us a reason.

Tall needle-trees—pines, Ashton tells me—lean over us and cast spotty shadows on the road. The full moon, blurry behind a layer of haze, is still bright enough to light everything evenly. Cold, white moonlight and doing nothing but walking... it’s like before the virus all over again. Post-revolt. Walking, looking for something you can’t define, hoping for something to happen to you. Not knowing when settling is your best option, or walking blindly into the night.

The town hasn’t changed much since camp. Broken glass glints in the moonlight, ivy climbs the walls and telephone poles, garbage and debris collect on the sides of roads like rocks in a river. Hot air rises out of the baked concrete.

The winding road cuts through the town. Halfway down the main drag everyone stops. A pack of wild dogs push through the plants and rubble between a few buildings. The one biggest one, floppy-eared and sand-colored, walks the slowest because the other smaller ones jump at its mouth and run circles around it. They’re skinny and I bet if you touch their fur, it’d be as wiry and foul as Punk’s. The big sand-colored dog stops and stares at us, green eyes reflecting in the moonlight. Punk hovers near me and the hair on his back, his ears, and tail stand straight up. But he stays with us even when the dogs pass by, the sand one trotting away quickly, leaving the little ones to scramble after it.

I guess if the dogs here are doing okay, that’s a good sign, right? There’s at least enough food to keep them alive. I can’t imagine all of those little ones making it, though. Thriving isn’t something that happens much anymore. But how would I know what ‘thriving’ feels like if all we’ve ever done was scrape by?

No one stops to make camp this time, the humans just go on walking. Good. The quicker we get there, the better.

The others slow down as the sun gets higher. I want to keep walking, the heat makes me feel like running. They decide to stop, resting under the shade of trees. We divvy up the food and drink before setting off again. “We need to maintain a manageable pace,” Alessandra had said before we left. “Steady. Don’t want to wear ourselves out.” Their idea of steady is like crawling. Sometimes Ashton will stop, stand in a patch of shade and write something in his journal, just so he can sprint to catch up in a second. If I’m feeling restless, then I can’t imagine how he feels.

Past the town lies a thick wood of dead brambles, thorns everywhere. The sharp vines nick and scratch the humans’ exposed skin and they hiss with irritation. The thorns glide off my skin. Alessandra raises her arms to avoid being snagged by an invasive vine and I catch a glimpse of the paper map in her hand. It’s hand-drawn. No visible marks telling where we started or where we’re bound. I won’t let myself feel disheartened by it, there’s no point. Forward is the only direction you can go when you have nothing left to go back to.

I have a theory. The less sleep I get, the less things bother me. Baking heat, dry air, hunger: fine. But the less sleep the humans get, the more aggravated they become. It’s only high noon when Peregrine and Vinder get too amped up by the sight of a strip mall and insist we stop for supplies.

“Fine, but hurry,” Alessandra says to the others, who head into a store. The illegible fragments of colored plastic that litter the sidewalk must have been the name of the store. My friends and I linger by the street and Alessandra and James wait near a couple gutted cars closer to the entrance. After a while Peregrine and Vinder emerge with shopping bags full of cans and colorful plastic wrappers.

“Gourmet eats, courtesy Pets Plus,” Peregrine says, letting a bag fall.

Jules can’t help herself. She laughs and walks over. “Wait,” she says. “That’s a pet store?”

Ashton, Cain, and I exchange a brief glance before slowly following Jules.

“Yeah,” Peregrine says, pulling a few cans out and tossing them to the closest people. Jules catches a can and reads the label critically.

“Beef, sweet potatoes, carrots, green beans, granny smith apples...? This is
dog
food?”

Peregrine laughs and says, “Yeah. Trust me, it’s edible. People used to eat crappier food than this. Look, it’s ‘human-grade ingredients made in a human-grade processing facility’. Crazy what people used to spend their money on.”

“And there’s freeze-dried chicken and vegetable... mush....” Vinder says. “Just add water, I guess. And salt, probably.” He hefts up a plastic container and grimaces. “Lots of salt....”

“Love them like family, feed them like family,” Peregrine says mockingly.

Vinder shrinks. “I
ate
a dog once.”

“Oh, watch out, Punk,” Peregrine says in a long wavering voice. “You’re on the menu.”

Punk cranes his neck and sniffs the bags with gusto, oblivious to Peregrine’s threats, until she pops open a can and dumps it on the ground. It looks about as good as it sounds coming out. Punk inhales it. He keeps licking the wet spot on the asphalt.

“Don’t worry, that was one of the nastier ones,” Peregrine says. “Chicken liver in pumpkin soup? No
thank
you.”

James watches from the car on the other side of the lot with a furrowed brow and crossed arms.

Punk touches the top of his head on Peregrine’s knee, asking her to scratch him again. He’s getting along with the humans better than we are. Even if Jules is friendly and they talk to her like they talk to each other, there’s a barrier between them. The way they watch us when we move, when we speak, it’s different than when they look at each other. They don’t let their guard down with us. They’re still wary.

Another cold night replaces the sun. I glance around at the humans, all sleeping in the alley next to the paint-covered brick wall. I can read some of the dripping messages, but their words might as well be foreign. Ashton told me once they were phrases from religious books, mostly, so close enough.

The humans seem so harmless when they sleep. Peregrine’s mouth is slightly open and Vinder sleeps with all his limbs curled in like a dog. James’s eyebrows permanently press together like even in his sleep he’s bitter. But it’s Alessandra I can’t stop looking at. She’s not... pretty, or anything (I shudder at the thought), just kind of baffling for some reason. Here is this human that bulldozed her way into my life, took control of everything I considered familiar, and turned all of it on its head. But I’m not mad. It’s like I’m unable to be mad. I feel like I
should
be, but I’m not. Her hair falls over her face in gentle dark waves and her eyes are lightly closed. It comes to the point where I’m
trying
to get angry at her. She tranquilized you, for crying out loud. And tied you up, threatened you with your deepest fear, kept you from your friends... and don’t forget, you still can’t trust her. She might act friendly, but humans are treacherous. They can wear ten thousand different masks to get you to trust them. Like the test supervisors.

I count on my fingers the days we’ve been gone. So far: five. The number seems so impossibly huge, but not compared to the number of days we have before us. Thinking about it makes my stomach feel hollow. I wonder what things would have turned out like if we had stayed at the silo instead of get wrapped up in this crazy scheme. Well. We’d probably be dead, actually. The chasm in my ribcage deepens when my mind tells me, ‘That might’ve be better than this.’ Would it?

I finally start drifting off to sleep as the sun starts to rise.

You can trust me.

...

Are you listening?

...How do I know that?

Because I’m your friend, E4-17. You know me.

No I don’t.

But I’m the one that runs your tests, don’t you remember? Don’t you remember?

I don’t remember. I don’t want to.

I’m Dr. Fitz, remember? You can trust me.

Pushed this one too far, eh?

Yeah, right. Shithead developers messed up the gene sequencing. See that lump, right there? On the neck?

Ugh, god, yeah....

Cancer. This one’s got it all over, too. Can you believe it, cancer at age twelve? Disgusting. They think we’re gonna win the war with this shit? After twenty years of developing and they’re still making mistakes like this.

Can we just get this over with, Fitz? It’s starting to smell.

Yeah. Just right in there, it’s set to the right temperature already. Nothing but ash in a few hours. Or maybe less. We could be out of here by lunch.

My own heavy breathing wakes me. My arms stretch forward, reaching for the body, but why, I don’t know. Just trying to protect things I can’t. Holding onto things that don’t last. My arms shake as I fold them back in. I press my palm over my brow and concentrate on breathing. My forehead is wet.

I must have only been out for an hour, the sky isn’t much lighter. Air seems a little too out of reach for my lungs to grasp.

Everyone’s still asleep. Good, my outburst didn’t wake them. From the traveling and paranoia, I thought I was too exhausted to have nightmares. Guess I was wrong.

It’s just one weird place after the other. I can’t imagine why humans would need all these things. We weave between giant containers in a field crisscrossed with railroad tracks, and I feel sick. Probably from that nightmare and not getting decent sleep, again.... It’s a hollow, rotten-on-the-inside sort of sick. Like if you cut me open like gutting an animal, you could scrape out a thick film of black sludge on the inside of my ribcage. I was hoping I wouldn’t get like this again, at least while we were traveling, but I should really just stop hoping for all the good it does me.

Alessandra might think we can’t get sick, but I beg to differ.

“You alright, dude?” Vinder says to me as we pass a row of shipping containers.

I can’t formulate a response for a second because of
dude
. “Fine.”

“Alright man, just making sure,” he says, smiling and walking ahead. He hops over some railroad tracks with a spring in his step and continues along, irritatingly cheery. I imagine him getting hit by a train, but not maliciously.