Out Of The Ashes (The Ending Series, #3) (44 page)

When Chris, Jake, and Carlos
appeared in the doorway, I stepped aside, allowing them room to enter. The fear
reflected in Jake’s eyes, the grief, was nothing compared to the overwhelming
sense of desperation that riddled every fiber of him. Worried I wouldn’t be
able to control my own emotions, not to mention everyone else’s, I left the
five of them alone and went out to the hallway to wait, a twin in each arm.

Aside from the bitterness I’d felt
toward Becca during our initial meeting back in Cañon City, she’d become my
friend. She’d been like a kindred spirit when I’d lost my memory, a sister of
sorts. Jake might never recover from losing her again, and I couldn’t bear the
thought of it, either.

But it wasn’t my choice, and it
wasn’t my life that would be in danger by trying to help her. It was a decision
Becca and Carlos needed to make together. I just hoped it was the one I wished
it would be.

After I paced for what felt like a
half hour, Carlos walked out of the room. His eyes met mine instantly, and I
wondered if that was a good or bad sign. He stopped in front of me and I held
my breath, waiting.

“Of course I’ll do it,” he said on
an exhale, and I let out an uneven sigh.

Harper and Chris filed out after,
reclaiming the babies from me.

I steadied myself and moved to the
doorway of Becca’s room. The tension in my chest eased and tears pricked my
eyes at the sight of Becca wrapped in Jake’s arms.

32

DANI

MAY 28, 1AE

The Farm, California

“Hey, Carlos,” I
said as I walked into the stable.

I could see him
through the open doorway of the first stall, Vanessa’s room for the foreseeable
future. He was seated on a wooden chair, his sister sitting on a sisal rug at
his feet as he combed through her rat’s nest of hair…or rather,
attempted
to
comb through it. Carlos cringed more than his sister did as each stroke caught
in the myriad of snarls, jerking her head back despite his obvious attempt to
be gentle. Vanessa hardly seemed to notice, instead continuing to whisper to the
empty space beside her.

I smiled at
Carlos. “Can I borrow you for a bit?” I bit my lip, feeling guilty about
stealing him away from Vanessa; his presence had an even more calming effect—if
not a
saning
effect—on her than Chris’s Ability, though Chris claimed
she was making progress in working through the tangled synapses of Vanessa’s
mind.

Tossing the comb
on a folding card table that was one of Vanessa’s three pieces of furniture—the
chair Carlos was sitting in, the card table, and a cot Jason and I had found
while,
ahem
, “exploring” some of the barn’s hidden recesses—Carlos
sighed. “Yeah. Not like this is doing any good anyway.”

“You could just
cut it all off,” I said with a shrug. “I’d offer to help, but I think she might
bite me if I came near enough…”

Vanessa snorted
and hissed, “Yesssss…” drawing out the sibilant word until she ended it with a
harsh cackle.

“Nessa!” Carlos
moved out of the chair and crouched in front of his sister so he could look her
in the eyes. “If you don’t have anything nice to say…” His tone was one a
parent might use on an unruly child.

Rolling her eyes,
Vanessa returned her attention to the air beside her. “I know, Rosie, you’re
right…she’s trying to steal
him
, too. First Annie, now my little
brother.” There was a long moment where she said nothing, and then she giggled.
“Like she wants to
be
me?” It was clear that Carlos and I were missing
out on an integral part of the conversation.

“Nessa,” Carlos
said, reaching out to touch his sister’s shoulder.

She brushed his
hand away, flicking an irritated glance at him.

Again, Carlos
sighed. “I love you,” he whispered before he stood. “I’ll be back in a bit,
okay?”

But Vanessa
didn’t respond; she was too busy conversing with “Rosie.”

Poor Carlos,
I thought. I cleared my throat as he approached,
backing out of the doorway so he could exit the stall.

“What do you need
me to do?” he asked once the padlock keeping his sister locked safely in the
stall was securely in place. He turned, looking at me, his eyes shining with
frustration…and an immeasurable amount of loss.

“Carlos…” I shook
my head. “It’s okay. Stay with her. I can find some other way to—”

“Don’t,” he said.
“Please.” His face hardened, but his eyes still shimmered with all of the pain
he was holding inside. “Don’t pity me. I’m just lucky to have her back.” He
laughed cynically. “Even like this.” And I knew he was thinking of Ky and Ben.

“Okay. Yeah,
okay…sorry.” Again, I shook my head, finding it impossible to shake off all of
my pity for him. “I just…” I looked up at him. “I think it’s really amazing
what you’re doing, you know, taking such good care of her.” Reaching for his
hand, I gave it a squeeze. “I’m so proud of you, and I’m sure your whole family
would be, too.
She
”—I nodded toward the stall—“would be proud of you.”

Carlos stared at
me for a few seconds, then looked back at the stall door—more
away
from
me than actually
at
the door—rubbed his hand over the several weeks of
hair growing on his shaved head, and made a rough coughing noise. He sniffed
once, twice, a third time, and wiped his hand over his face before returning
his gaze to me. “You, uh, needed me for something?” he said, his voice a little
hoarse.

“Oh, right.
Yeah…” I smiled and pointed out the stable door, to the water tank a short ways
up the hill behind the farmhouse. “It’s empty. I need you to do your mojo and
get the pump going so I can finish setting up the chicken coop.” Eager, I
rubbed my hands together and started bouncing on the balls of my feet. “I
sensed a bunch of hens and a few roosters nearby—I’m going to bring ’em in once
the coop’s ready, and all that’s left to do now is fill the watering thingies.”

“Got it.” With
one final glance back at the stall door, Carlos strode outside, me at his side;
I had to take three steps for every two of his. He stared out toward the raised
water tank. “I just filled that thing this morning.” He looked at me askance.
“How’d we go through it so fast?”

I shrugged. “Just
finishing getting the farm set up, I guess. I had to fill the troughs in all
three pens and in the pasture, the water buckets in the goat house and all the
stable stalls…” I glanced at Carlos. “Except for your sister’s. And Mase and
Camille converted part of the old barn into a washhouse—for clothes, not
people”—I cocked my head to the side—“though that’s not a bad idea. But anyway,
Mase and Camille have been doing an epic load of laundry, and by the time I got
around to the chickens, the tank was dry.”

“Got it,” Carlos
repeated as we trudged uphill through overgrown grass and bobbing spheres of
mostly white clover flowers and a few violet-tinged red clover flowers.

Without thinking,
I picked one of the red clover spheres with a longer stem and started plucking
off the tiny flowers to suck the nectar out. As far as I was concerned, it was
never a bad time for something sweet. I held out the flowers to Carlos. “Want
some?”

He shook his
head.

I shrugged. “Did
you know that when these get moldy, they act as a blood thinner?”

Carlos shot me a
sideways glance that said “Why the hell would I know that?” more clearly than
words could have. “That another one of the traditional medicine things your
grandma taught you?”

I nodded slowly.
“You know, I always thought she was so silly with all that stuff, but now I
wish I’d paid more attention…remembered more of what she taught me. I think
next time we make a trip to New Bodega, I’ll stop by Grams’s house and pick up
her recipe book and some of her herbalism stuff.”

“Stuff?”

“Yeah, you know,
like a mortar and pestle, measuring cups, that kind of thing.” I tossed the
stripped clover stem onto the ground. “Could be useful,” I said, thinking about
Harper and his increasing hesitancy to give us antibiotics every time one of us
injured ourselves enough to risk infection. According to him, the antibiotics
might do more harm than good at this point.

“Seems like a
good plan,” Carlos said. “And hey, maybe there’s some herbalism thing that can
help with the Re-gens.”

“Help with the
Re-gens?”

“Yeah, you know,
the degeneration thing that’s making Becca sick…?”

I stared at him
as we continued uphill. “Becca’s sick?”

Carlos met my
eyes, disbelief in his. “Zoe didn’t tell you about what happened earlier?”

“I haven’t seen
her since this morning…when she was
looking
for Becca,” I said, waving
my hand in a keep-going gesture. “So what’s going on? What hasn’t she told me?”

“That the
Re-gens…they’re dying.”

My stomach lurched.
Stopping mid-step, I grabbed his arm and pulled him around to face me.
“What?”

What he explained
next horrified me. I felt like he’d punched me in the gut, then pulled the ground
out from under me. If Becca was right, and the Re-gens were constantly on the
cusp of degenerating back to their natural state—
dead
—then Camille and
Mase were constantly in danger from what had been done to them at the Colony.
They could die any day…unless Carlos, or someone like Carlos, was around to
recharge their biological batteries every now and again.

“Are you sure
you’re up for that?” I asked, eyes wide with the horror his words had ignited.
“I mean, maintaining Camille and Mase’s health with daily doses of
electrotherapy is one thing, but how much power is it going to take to
revitalize Becca? Is it even possible?”

Carlos raised his
shoulders. “Dunno, but there’s only one way to find out.” He continued walking,
and I had to jog a few steps to catch up to him.

“Well, at least
you won’t have to do
this
much longer,” I said, gesturing toward the
water tank and tiny pump house several dozen yards ahead. “So you’ll be able to
save up all your juice for keeping them from devolving or degenerating or whatever
you’re calling it.”

When Carlos’s
brow furrowed, I explained, “Jason’s
working on
that old wind
mill down by the
storage barn. He’s pretty sure
it’s
usable, so once he gets it working, we’ll be able to use that instead. Should
be a day or two…or three, but
hopefully
not more than that.”

Carlos shrugged.
“I’ll do what needs to be done. Becca was stupid to wait this long to tell us.
She’s
really
sick, and even though I did a pretty intensive
electrotherapy session with her earlier…” He shook his head. “I don’t know if
it’ll work. She was just so stupid to—”

“You never know
what she
saw
,” I said as we reached the squat little pump house beside
the water tank. “You know how she is…it could be that telling us would’ve meant
we’d all die horrible deaths, or something like that.” I leaned my hip against
the edge of the roof of the pint-size building while Carlos crouched before the
short door to open it.

Reaching inside, he
touched the well pump’s motor, and a few seconds later, it whirred to life.
Touching whatever he was charging up was by no means necessary for Carlos, but
it made the task a whole lot easier
and
it prevented the faint electric
tingle that charged the air whenever he used his Ability from a distance.

I studied his
youthful, handsome face. He was so freaking adorable. If only he’d been a
little less attractive, maybe his first few months after the outbreak wouldn’t
have been so bad for him…except for everything that happened with his brother
and sister…and Annie…

“What?” He was
watching me watch him, his shoulders hunched.

“Nothing.” I
looked away, shifting my attention to the farm laid out below us. The barns and
stable were set up in a “U” formation, with the gravel roundabout filling the
empty space between them. The grand old farmhouse, its adorable little
companion cottage, and the brick oven and flagstone patio took up the remaining
side of the roundabout, and beyond them lay a large garden, a greenhouse, the
root cellar, the orchards, and a creek feeding into the pond. It was our own little
slice of homesteader heaven.

“Have you had a
chance to explore this place much?” I asked Carlos.

He shook his
head. “Been spending most of my time with Nessa and doing this…and now, helping
the Re-gens.”

“You should take
a break, walk around…maybe stop by the windmill and see if Jason needs any
help. Oh, and there are beehives over by the garden shed, too, just past the
greenhouse. Those are pretty neat.” I squinted, hoping to catch a glimpse of my
other half between the end of the stable and the storage barn, where the
windmill stood, but I couldn’t see him. I sighed and focused instead on the
garden. “Or you could find Grayson—help him with his surveying and whatnot,” I
suggested, thinking of our resident “farming” expert.

Carlos pulled out
of the little mini-shed. He stood, took a step backward, and tripped.

I reached for him
instinctively, and the moment my fingers closed around his wrist, I couldn’t
make them let go. Because I was suddenly on fire with electricity.

Wrenching himself
free, Carlos stumbled backward.

My knees gave
out, and I held myself up on hands and knees as I gasped for air.

“Jesus…fuck,
Dani! Are you okay?”

Somehow, I
managed to wave at him with one hand. “Yeah…yeah…I’m good.”

Except for one
thing: I couldn’t feel a single mind. Electricity had knocked my Ability
out…again.

~~~~~

As promised by
the Council, a pair of New Bodega-ers made a delivery in the late afternoon.
They’d spared some of their precious fuel supply to power up a hybrid SUV,
bringing us not only three coolers filled with fresh seafood—rock cod, crab,
shrimp, and abalone, as well as several types of seaweed—but also a
solar-powered generator and a several-week supply of dry goods. The generator
was meant to power the chest freezer in the farmhouse’s enormous pantry so we
could store the seafood longer and put more time between deliveries.

After the two of
them left, Ky, Camille, and Becca built up the fire in the huge brick oven
behind the farmhouse and started making dinner with the new supplies. The rest
of us returned to our work around the farm—Harper putting the final touches on
his infirmary in the ground-floor master bedroom, Tavis and Sam storing our
spare weapons and ammo in the laundry-room-turned-armory, Carlos and Mase
joining Jason to help with the windmill, Grayson appraising the fields across
the road from the farm, Chris and Biggs scouting around the perimeter of the
farm for the best path for a fence we could convert into a wall over time, and
me mucking out the stables with Annie’s help. Which consisted more of the
little girl rolling around on the floor of the stable aisle with Jack, while
Zoe, once again on baby duty, was watching me from a bench in the aisle, one
little baby bundle in her arms and the other in a carrier on the bench beside
her.