Ashes ashes the complete.., p.12
Ashes, Ashes: The Complete Series, page 12
“Don’t do that again, Wasserman,” I warned him.
“Or what? What are you going to do—?”
That’s when I punched him. It was in the “good” side of his face, but I really wouldn’t have cared it the blow had landed on the tender burned skin—as long as he shut up and kept his hands off the steering wheel.
Wasserman looked like he couldn’t believe I’d actually raised my hands to him. Then with the grunt of a pissed-off Spanish bull, he lowered his head and charged.
“Stop it! Stop it!” I heard Amaranth and felt her arms around me but she was no match for either of us. Wasserman and I wrestled each other, his head making a shaggy missile in the center of my chest while he flailed away at my abdomen with his right hand, his left hand balled-up and still nearly useless at his side. We fell over Amy, who still sat in the center aisle. Something bounced off my hip and hit the ground, but I didn’t care. My only thought was to hurt Wasserman as badly as I could. I felt almost like if I could just do that—if I could just hurt him—then everything else would be okay.
I pried him off me, and then hit him again—this time on the side where the bandages had been.
He was right: he was a joker not a fighter. Even if he’d been whole I probably could have taken him, but injured as he was, he fell back, panting and whimpering, holding his face. I wasn’t proud of myself, but I hated him too much right then to care.
“I’ve told you before: I’ve got to get Lilly to the Mountain Place. And either you can come with me—or you can get out!” I shouted at him. “And that goes for the rest of you, too. Get it?”
Wasserman glared at me out of his one good eye and opened his mouth like he had some smart ass reply. But the words never found breath. One second he was shooting malevolence at me and in the next instant, horror replaced the anger in his features.
I swung around.
Amy stood behind me with a gun her hand. My gun, I realized as I looked down at my holster. She racked it with such calm precision that I realized she knew exactly what she was doing, even though she’d never mentioned having firearms experience before. She pointed the Glock at her own ear, angled upwards so the round would penetrate her skull and explode into her brain.
“Amy, what are you doing?” I demanded, stretching out my hand. “Give me that—”
“You can have it back when I’m done.” Her face was a mess: running mascara and smudged lipstick, soot and blood merged under her swollen eyes and raw nose. A stupid random thought crossed my mind: if she could see herself now, she’d probably drop dead from embarrassment.
It was almost funny, but the calm, determined tone of her voice wasn’t anything to laugh about.
“You don’t want to do this, Amy.”
“Yes. Yes, I do.” She wasn’t crying anymore, not at all. “My mom was the only person who ever really loved me…” She lifted her shoulders. “Without her what—what’s left—?”
“I didn’t know you knew how to use a gun.” It was lame, but it was the first distraction that popped into my head.
Amy’s eyes locked on me.
“So?”
I shrugged. “You don’t seem like the type.”
Amy frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You know. Homecoming Queen and all that—”
Amy’s lips scrunched with disdain. It was annoying, but it was more like what I was used to seeing in her face.
“You’re a nice guy, Liam, but what you don’t know is just amazing,” she muttered. “I wasn’t running for Homecoming Queen. You have to be a senior to do that. I was running for Sophomore Princess. Part of the court.” She lifted her chin at me like “so there” for only an instant before her shoulders collapsed. “Not that that matters either…” she whispered and her finger twitched on the trigger.
“You know,” Amaranth’s voice was gentler I’d ever heard it—at least when she was talking to Amy. “I voted for you. For Homecoming Princess.”
“Why? We hate each other.”
“True,” Amaranth paced into Amy’s line of vision cautiously, her hands slightly raised as though Amy was considering armed robbery, not suicide. “But I had to vote for somebody, right? And those other chicks?” she snorted. “Dog-faced wannabes. They didn’t have a prayer. You were definitely the prettiest. And, I guess, since you’re going to kill yourself and it doesn’t matter anymore, I can admit that I was always a little jealous of you. I mean, you were pretty, you were popular and even though you play dumb, you’re not.”
Amy glared at her suspiciously.
“True,” she said slowly. “I’m not dumb. In fact, I know exactly what you’re trying to do—”
“Well, yeah, I figured you would,” Amaranth agreed. “I’m trying to stop from you from doing something stupid like killing yourself.”
“What do you care?”
“I don’t. It’s just…” Amaranth jammed her fists into the pockets of her short coat and stared past us all, like she was seeing something that wasn’t there.
“Yeah?” Amy pressed, challenging her to speak, but she lowered the gun just a little like Amaranth had opened just the tiniest crack in her resolve. “If you have something relevant to say—”
“You don’t have the right.” Amaranth said harshly, turning away from her. “You don’t have the right to kill. None of us do—”
“It’s my life. Who are you to tell me—”
“My father killed my mother. Then killed himself. In front of me. When I was five. He was angry because she was leaving and he decided he had the right. To kill her. And himself. And—and—I paid for it. I’m still paying…” Amaranth wouldn’t look at any of us. She rubbed herself like she was cold and talked to the tip of her sneaker. “The people who dropped this bomb thought they had the right. And look at us. We’re all paying for it. Your mom and your brother. And Nester’s Mom and stepdad. Wasserman’s family. All of them—all of the people we knew. People who didn’t do anything.” She looked at Amy suddenly, her eyes dry and her pale lips a hard straight line. “And if you do this, if you blow your stupid brains out on this bus in front of all of us, you’re no better than those bombers. You’re just another killer who’s leaving the rest of us to clean up your mess.” She nodded at me. “Whether she does it or she doesn’t, we have to get moving. If she wants to die, let her get out. Make her get out. And then drive, Harper.”
She turned her back on Amy, the gun and all of us and marched back to the front of the bus, plopping down in the seat behind the driver. She stared straight ahead like we were going on a field trip or something.
Amy waited, but when it became clear that Amaranth was completely and totally done with her, her gaze flicked to me. Her swollen eyes filled with tears again, and when she spoke, her voice trembled like it had been smashed into a thousand tiny pieces.
“Honestly, Liam,” she said, struggling to achieve her usual superiority and failing abysmally. “You need a firearm safety review,” she said, dropping my gun back into the hip holster and buttoning the flap. She patted my shoulder awkwardly and I realized how tiny she was. I probably could have lifted her straight over my head like they did for those cheerleader jumps.
She wiped her face, but the sobs were still in her throat when she asked, “D-did you vote for me, too, Liam?”
“Vote for you?” I asked. Color me clueless, but I’d completely forgotten.
“For Sophomore Homecoming Princess.”
“Oh…yeah. Sure.”
Her laugh was almost immediately swallowed by a gut-twisting sob. She sank to the floor of the bus, weeping, but this time, when Wasserman slipped an arm around her, she didn’t shove him away.
“Please don’t leave me, Amy,” he whispered, his voice trembling. “I…I don’t have anyone else. We don’t—have—anyone else…”
I pretended not to hear as he started to cry.
“Liam?” Lilly grabbed my hand as I passed the cot on my way back to the steering wheel. Her skin was dry and hot and her brown eyes glittered like topaz, but other than that she seemed to have made a complete recovery from her seizure.
“Yeah, Lilly?”
“We’re going to find Dad now, right?”
The journey ahead was two tons of rock on my back. Between the state of the road, the distance and the emotions buffeting us, the bus felt like another Hole I desperately needed to escape from.
“Yeah.” I was exhausted and we hadn’t even begun. “Just close your eyes. When you open them, we’ll be there.”
Nester sat on the black rubber floor mat beside her cot. The medical kit was open, but it didn’t look like he’d found much useful in it. His head was down and I couldn’t see his face beneath the mushroom of soot-sprinkled kinky hair, but when he sniffled softly, I knew he was crying, too—for Amy’s losses, for Amaranth’s and for his own. Elise and Nate were holding hands like sister and brother, fear and sadness rolling down their faces in a wash of tears. Amaranth sat across from them, still and pale as a statue, colorless except for the violent red of her hair and angry emerald of her eyes.
The bus was still running, burning fuel. The gas gauge read “full” but the winding hills of the back roads to the mountains would drain most of it—just as they always had in the past—and that was without having to ride on the shoulder or push cars out of the way.
As I sank into the seat, I caught a glimpse of my own face in the rearview mirror. After a week underground, my skin was the color of a newspaper and spotted with black soot and my eyes seemed gigantic above my cheekbones. I just want things to be the way they were before, I thought, feeling a lump of something I didn’t dare let out rise in my throat. I just wish things were the way they were before. Of course, that would mean going back to JFK: to Wasserman making me miserable and Amy looking through me and Nester running hot and cold. But Mom would come home at 6 pm and Dad would take me out in the early hours of the morning and we’d perch in the deer stand waiting, our breath making white streamers in the crisp air. This time, when he handed me the neck of his whiskey bottle, I’d take a long pull instead of shaking my head and turning away. We’d be a family again—even if we were a family that everyone else thought was crazy.
You don’t have the right. None of us do. Amaranth’s words were in my brain now like a graffiti artist had tagged all the available space behind my eyeballs with them. You don’t have the right. Everything around me proved her right: the blackened trees, the sunless sky, the twisted remnants of cars and damaged buildings. All the dead and the sad forms of the dying we’d run from like specters of our own future. I wondered about the people who’d broken into our house and how long they’d survive here. And then, unwelcome but necessary, I imagined Mrs. Standish and her family picking their way through this hell they didn’t make.
I almost turned back to go look for them.
But then I remembered how she hadn’t hesitated to kick me in the face and I couldn’t. Something inside me wouldn’t bend that far. It hurt too much—and not just the lump on my cheek.
I hit the gas and the bus jerked forward, taking us away from the place that once been our home.
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Out of Gas
“Are we there yet?”
Nate was just about the only person on the bus speaking to me, but I didn’t take it personally. No one had said anything at all for a very long time. He handed me one of the cans of baked beans Amaranth had opened and a spoon and then slid into the seat behind me.
I’d been driving for about three hours—if you could call it that. The bus was heavy and slow and the roads were filled with obstacles. If the speedometer rose above 25 miles per hour for more than thirty seconds, I looked in the rearview mirror like I was expecting a speeding ticket. But we were moving. Slowly, but we were moving.
There were still cars blocking us on this narrow two-lane highway, but these were abandoned, not burned. And there were bodies, too. Not blackened human-like forms but bodies, recognizable as the people they had been when they were alive. They were the remains of the zombies—the living dead we’d seen following Wasserman and Amy—who must have escaped the first horror of the blast only to die from the effects of the fallout over the days that followed. I struggled to avoid running over them, but even with the headlights on high, the sky and ground were so dark that every now and then, when I had to swerve to the shoulder of the road to avoid a car, the tires would thump hard on something and then roll off quickly and I would know, with sickening certainty what I’d done. I thought one of the others might have said something, but from the rear of the bus there was only darkness and silence. Wasserman and Amy still sat near the rear, huddled together, but like Lilly they must have been asleep. Amaranth and Elise sat in the long seat on the passenger side. Their heads were turned toward the window like they were on a leisurely drive through the fall foliage or something.
“That sign said ‘Welcome to West Virginia,’” Nate continued. “It won’t be much longer now, will it?”
Little by little, our surroundings had changed. We’d left behind the clustered homes and townhouses of the residential suburbs not long after Wasserman and Amy had rejoined us. The homes sat further from the road and then they gave way to acres of dead corn or open grazing land. We passed dairy farms and horse farms, their names written on once-white boards in whimsical script: “House in the Woods Farm” “Montgomery Diary” and “Happy Horse Stables.” From time to time, a shuttered gas station or convenience store broke the monotony, but even if we had stopped, the smashed windows and dark interiors didn’t invite us in for Slim Jims and Slurpees. From time to time I still had to maneuver around an abandoned car, but on the whole, the population had thinned and with it, the evidence of mass exodus. There hadn’t been a heat wave here: nothing was burned. Instead, the ground was barren with the coming winter and the fields were silent—out of respect or something.
And then at last there was a long stretch where there weren’t any bodies or cars at all. There was nothing but the dark gray sky and black soot, just not as thick as we’d seen it before.
Finally even the homes and farms fell away, abandoning the side of the road for thick tree-covered hills. The road sliced through the dark forest, a dull blade of gray glinting dully under the bus’s headlights.
“It’s not much further, right?” Nate repeated.
“We’re not going very fast. At this pace, Nate, I really don’t know.”
My head hurt. So did my eyes, my shoulders and most of the rest of my body. It felt like forever since I’d slept. But all I could think of was the Mountain Place. If I could just keep going—even at this slow pace—we’d be there in the morning. Dad would take charge and they’d all stop expecting me to know what to do—and then getting mad at me when I didn’t. I could go back to being just another dumb kid who says he can’t wait to grown up, but knows deep down inside that he isn’t ready.
If I could just keep driving, if I could just keep the bus moving forward along the narrow roads of the Appalachians… If I could just keep going…
The bus slowed. I hunched over the wheel and gave the engine a bit more gas, but nothing happened. The bus rolled slower and slower no matter how hard I pressed the accelerator, until finally, it coasted to a stop.
“What’s the matter?”
“Are we there now?”
“Why are we stopping?” The voices rose around me.
“No!” I cried, staring down at the gas gauge. “That’s impossible!”
“What?” Nate and Nester said simultaneously, racing after me as I opened the bus doors and tumbled down the stairs. I yanked the hatch on the passenger side panel where the gas tank lay, but it was too dark and I couldn’t see anything.
“What is it, man?” Nester repeated.
“We’re out of gas,” I muttered. “We shouldn’t be…there should have been enough—”
“It’s leaking.” I didn’t realize that Amaranth had gotten off the bus until she appeared from around its rear end, pointing a flashlight at the ground with one hand and holding Elise’s hand with the other. Elise glanced at me. I wasn’t sure if it was just habit, or if she felt like she needed protection, but she touched the cross around her neck.
“See?” Amaranth continued. “The little drops?”
Little splashes that looked like the first drops of a light rain traced a path from the rear of the bus. I followed them a few yards and realized we’d been like Hansel and Gretel, leaving a trail of precious fuel drops since we left home.
“From driving on the median,” Nester pronounced. “You must have scraped the tank’s bottom on the concrete.”
“Thanks for that Captain Obvious.” Amaranth rolled her eyes at him and Nester let his glare substitute for a snappy comeback. Amy and Wasserman slid off the bus to join the discussion.
“Well, there really wasn’t much choice, was there?” I said defensively. My body ached from the long hours behind the wheel and I could tell by the looks on their faces I was in for another round of arguing and blame. I closed my eyes and sat down on the asphalt, bracing myself against their accusations and the first rumbles of my temper. But to my surprise, I didn’t feel angry. I was too tired for that. The ground was hard and cold, ready for the first mountain snow, but right then, I wanted nothing more than to stretch out on the asphalt and sleep—even if it meant that I’d never wake up again. But I couldn’t. I needed silence and they wouldn’t stop talking.
“So now what?” Wasserman jammed his hands in his pockets and flicked his hood over his head as another brisk gust of wind shook our clothing like we had something it wanted. On the horizon, an angry flash of orange slit the sky for an instant. It didn’t look like lightning, but who could tell anymore? I wouldn’t have known it was after ten in the evening without my watch. Lilly was the only one left on the bus. Sleeping, like I told her to—only I’d promised that we’d be home when she woke up. Instead, I’d have to tell her to lace up her boots and drop a pack of gear on her shoulders. Big brother of the year, that was me.
