Ashes ashes the complete.., p.36
Ashes, Ashes: The Complete Series, page 36
“It’s not like on TV, Amy. It’s not like the movies. It came down to could we shoot an unconscious, unarmed man in the back! And I couldn’t do it. If you were standing there, I bet you couldn’t have done it either,” I screamed. “Back off up me!”
Amy’s face hardened into an older, more world-weary mask. “You’re wrong. I think I could have shot him. In the back. Unconscious. Whatever. I think I could. And you know why, Nester?” She didn’t wait for me to ask, but continued, wound up on her own trip of anger and fear. “Because I don’t ever, ever want to be as scared as I was on trip up here. I don’t ever want to be at anyone’s mercy—not ever again. From now on, it’s shoot first, ask questions later—”
“Like Marty?” Amaranth asked quietly. I knew she was behind me, but I couldn’t look at her, not even when she stepped into the space at my elbow. “When he shot Liam?”
Amy’s pale skin flushed pink.
“We need to go see if we can fix the shed. Right now there’s a tractor sized hole in the side of it,” Amy continued without answering her. “And we need to try to set some booby traps around the cabin’s perimeter—”
“Knock yourself out,” I snapped. I was done with the Mountain Place and everyone inside it. “I’ve barely slept and I’ve had nothing to eat. You’re not working me to death, Amy. Go give Rod your ‘honey do list’ and see how well it gets done.” I know it was mean, but I’d had it and couldn’t stop myself. “Or see if Marty or Katie will help you. Amaranth’s standing there, ask her. What? Burned all your bridges? Boo hoo for you. I’m done, okay? This brother’s going inside.”
Then I marched past her into the cabin and I didn’t stop until I was alone in one of the upstairs bedrooms, where I could close the door and shut them all out.
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Pillowcase Talk
“I think we’re done.”
I jumped, surprised by the voice, I’d been so completely lost in my own world, I’d forgotten I wasn’t alone.
Marty stood behind me, a bloody knife in his hand. His protective suit was like mine, slick with blood from the entrails of the goat. Nate stood beside him, wearing a white protective suit that strained his girth like it was two sizes too small. As usual, he was completely unwelcome.
“Take a break, then we’ll quarter it.”
It had been two days since the convict escaped from the shed: two days of frenzied activity and Amy’s recriminations. Two days since Amaranth and I had done what’d we’d done. Two days of waiting for the other shoe to drop.
A day ago, Marty and I had found the tractor—less than 500 yards from the shed. The man had barely made it down to the edge of the lake in the thing before having to abandon it. We found it with its tank dry and its cab empty. Reporting those facts didn’t do a thing to get us back into anyone’s good graces and a part of me didn’t care. All of them stayed away from me: Amy because of the convict, Amaranth and Elise because of what happened in the woods, and Liam and Rod because they knew I was sick of doing all the grunt work they weren’t able to do. That left Katie and Marty. More and more, those two country kids were my best and only friends.
I got pretty friendly with own guilt and doubts, too.
Amy’s words kept circling in my brain: about not wanting to be at anyone’s mercy. About shooting first and asking questions later. Much as I wanted to dismiss her as wrong, I wasn’t sure any more.
I’d been so certain the man was dying…but apparently I’d been wrong. And deep down, I knew the truth was that I hadn’t wanted to shoot him. I wasn’t sure I could have.
Think of it like a video game, Nate suggested. Sort of real. But not.
Thank you for that totally unhelpful suggestion, you idiot.
Days had gone by without Nate’s appearance—like he, too, was ashamed of me and couldn’t bear to be in my presence. I’d begun to hope he’d finally gone to the light.
But no. For some reason, he was back again, wagging his head at me in an I Know What You Did Last Summer kind of way. He bothered me, but Elise’s abandonment bothered me the most. As hard as it had been to get my work done with her constantly at my heels, I’d gotten kind of used to her. And she’d seemed to be getting better, slowly. Now she’d relapsed back to not responding, barely eating, barely sleeping and of course, not speaking.
That she didn’t trust me anymore hurt almost as much as the weight of guilt I felt standing between me and Liam.
“Did you find it?” he had asked me as soon as I set foot in the cabin.
I opened my coat like a dude selling watches on a New York City street corner and Liam exhaled like he’d been holding his breath since I’d left to search.
“Does she know you’ve got it?”
I nodded.
“What did she say?”
The memory of Amaranth’s touch flowed back over me. My ears lit up like he’d put a flame to some wick inside me.
“What can she say?” I said, turning away from him. “Your father has an awful lot of this stuff.”
Liam didn’t answer. When I got my face under control and turned back to look at him, he was frowning into the pages of the book on his lap.
“I think I’ve got a perfect hiding place,” I said, but he didn’t answer.
I mounted the stairs and found Nate’s old backpack crumpled in the pile of stuff that belonged to me. I loaded the bottles into it and dropped the backpack into the cedar chest at the foot of the cot. I was covering it with some of my clothes, when Elise came in.
“Shh,” I said, trying to smile. “I found a good hiding place, Elise.”
She climbed on the bed and turned her face to the wall, shutting me down so completely my heart sank.
Of course, she doesn’t trust you. She saw you getting down with your boy Liam’s girl. And him all busted up and everything. That’s low, man—
Nate’s head wagged back and forth like he was a man of the world and not some dumb twelve year old with even less experience than I had. But I found myself arguing, justifying myself anyway.
It wasn’t my fault. You saw what happened. She just—just—
Looked to me like you weren’t minding it so much.
“Enough,” I said aloud, bringing the barn and the present back to life. Marty shrugged like I was talking to him.
“Well, we got to finish it,” he said. “But you’re right. We need a break.”
It was only the second time I’d skinned an animal and while I didn’t feel like I was any better at it, this time I didn’t throw up when we pulled out the entrails. Without the head or the skin, it didn’t look like a goat anymore: just hunks of bloody muscle. I walked around the goat’s carcass, inspecting it. Evidence of the lesions we’d seen on the animal’s skin showed in the muscle. I took my knife and sawed deep, to the bone.
“I’m not sure we’re going to be able to eat this,” I said with a sigh. “Look.”
Marty barely reached my elbow, but he tilted his head and peered at the slice I’d taken from the animal’s hide. The flesh looked warped and smelled diseased. He ran his hand along the goat’s flank. “Maybe we can butcher around those parts? And we can salt cure it. Brine it good. Then, maybe?”
“I don’t know. All of us have already been exposed…” I didn’t finish the sentence. I didn’t know how. If we were all dying anyway, what difference would eating the meat of an irradiated goat make?
Marty sat down heavily, leaning his back against the cow’s stall. The animal was alive but only barely, now almost completely overtaken by the symptoms of radiation poisoning. It lay on its side, huffing out giant breaths and lowing weakly. There probably wasn’t any point in slaughtering it now; it was too far gone. The sow had died already, blood oozing out of every orifice, its skin peeling away from its body in loose pus-filled strips. It had taken all of us who were able to drag it out of the barn. After much debate about burying or burning, we surrendered it to nature and went back inside.
“Dammit,” Marty pulled back the hood of his suit and lifted his respirator to take a sip from our water bottle. There were shadows under his eyes.
“You all right?” I asked folding myself down in the hay beside him. My whole body ached; it was a feeling I was getting to used to, along with being about eight hours short on sleep. But at least today when we went back up to the cabin, there would be food and warmth. Rod was cooking the midday meal: beans and rice mixed with one of our remaining cans of soup to give it some flavor. He’d perfected dumplings made with flour and some lard we’d found in the root cellar and those would be sprinkled into the mixture, too. We’d each get a tablespoon of sweet peach preserves on a bit of yesterday’s bread for dessert. Once, I would have turned up my nose at such a meal, but now, my stomach grumbled at the thought of it…especially since Amaranth was supposed to cook our supper. Everything she made ended up tasting like an overcooked hockey puck.
Amaranth…
She’d spent the last two days wandering around with dark hollows under her eyes, a ghost floating from room to room. I knew she hadn’t had a drink in days…but she hadn’t slept, either. I didn’t know if it was nightmares or guilt or something else. I didn’t ask. I stayed as far from her as I could, but the insomnia was going to be as big a problem for us as the drinking if it didn’t let up soon.
“Ain’t been sleepin’ so good,” Marty said, adding his insomnia to hers. “Keep thinking about that man.” His granite gray eyes fixed on mine. “You still think we done right?”
“We did what we did,” I said, reaching for the water bottle after him. “Can’t undo it now.”
Nate stuck out his hand to be next for the canteen and I almost handed it to him, until I remembered he wasn’t really there.
“You still think he’s dead out there somewhere?”
“Yeah,” I answered, realizing that was true. “I do.”
“But your friend—Amy— she don’t think so.”
I sighed. “Amy’s working through some stuff. Some stuff that happened on our way here. And…” I hesitated, but Marty was smart. He had to have already guessed at the truth. “She’s worried about Rod.”
“He’s got what the animals got.” It was a statement, not a question. “What the man had.”
I nodded.
“Is he gonna die, too?”
I didn’t know how to answer that. Rod looked so bad it was like he was already dead, his body just didn’t know it yet. The haircut Amy had given him couldn’t conceal that his hair was falling out in clumps and the depth of the shadows under his eyes gave him a perpetually haunted look. Little red sores covered his face and arms. He looked like an ancient old man with a bad case of zits... and every day he was a little weaker. He avoided me like the plague. Like he was afraid I’d tell him something he didn’t want to hear.
“I—I guess so,” I said and felt the same twisted braid of rage and grief that I’d felt digging Lilly’s grave.
“But you’re good with the medical stuff,” Marty pressed. “There ain’t nothing you can do?”
I shook my head. “I wish there was. I really… wish…” I stopped. For a long time, I didn’t, couldn’t say anything. Nate and Marty sat one on either side of me, waiting for me to get myself together.
“See, after—after my brother got killed, we all made a promise to each other. That we wouldn’t lose another one of us. That we’d take care of each other. Like a family.”
Marty nodded. “They was telling the story. Rod and Amaranth, a few nights back. About the stuff that happened to y’all, trying to get here. About the bear.” He paused. “Don’t know what that must have felt like, seeing that man wearing the skin.“
How did it feel, Nester?
For once, Nate didn’t sound like he was mocking me. He sounded genuine, like he really wanted to know.
“Felt like a punch in the gut. Reminded me… of all the things I wish I’d done and didn’t—couldn’t— do. ” The words tumbled out my mouth before I could stop them. It wasn’t something I could have said to any of the others. But Marty didn’t know Nate. Never had. And he didn’t know me—or at least not the person I’d been before—either. The goat’s blood dripped steadily on the hay, making an odd background noise for the true confessions of a teenaged brother.
“And it was my fault, anyway,” I told the kid. “It was my fault that bear got him.”
“Don’t see how,” Marty grumbled. “Way I heard it, Liam was the one who was supposed to be watching—“
“Yeah,” I sighed. “He fell asleep. But I can’t be mad at him for that. You—you—“ My voice got crackly like a cell phone in a dead zone. “You don’t know tough it was. He—all of us—we were so hungry and so exhausted—“
“Been hungry. Been tired.” Marty’s eyes bored into mine, telling a story I didn’t really want to hear. But there wasn’t any judgment in them, just the weird kinship of bad tales.
“Yeah, I guess you have,” I said. “So Liam fell asleep. Doesn’t matter. It was me who did it. I was the one who hitched a ride to his school as soon as the fire alarms went off. I was the one who said we should go to Liam’s. Who took my stepdad’s joke about begging the Harpers to let us in literally. If I could go back—” I stopped. Marty waited while I sorted through my feelings and translated them into words. “If I could go back, when I heard the bombs were coming, I’d have still have gotten him from school. But then, I’d have stood in the center of my street—and I’d have made him stand with me—and I’d have spread my arms open wide and let the heat wave do its thing.”
Marty considered that for a moment. Then he reached under the elastic leg of his coverall and pulled out a scrap of fabric.
“That’s from the convict’s pillowcase.”
“Yeah.”
“How—“ I furrowed my brow trying to remember.
“You said there weren’t nothing in it. Tossed most of it away. But, I found this.“
He unwound the strip of fabric to reveal an old piece of notebook paper, folded and refolded so many times its edges were torn and stained.
“What is it?”
Marty nodded to the paper. “Open it.”
Family Ties
Not that you care, but you’re a father. There’s two of ‘em. The boy almost didn’t make it and they say he ain’t never gonna grow right. But like I said, what do you care? You ain’t gonna be no kind of father to ’em nohow. By the time they let you out, they’ll be grown and won’t need you. I don’t need you now, you sonofabitch. But here’s the life your sorry ass missed out on the day you got the idea robbing banks was an easier way to get money than getting a goddamned job and supporting your family.
A picture fell out of the fold. Of two kids—a girl and a boy—sitting together on a threadbare quilt. The girl looked like she was about six or eight months old. She was dressed in someone’s idea of fancy: a fuchsia onesie with a big flowered headband around her bald head. Her skin was the color of honey and at the moment the picture was snapped, she was either laughing or crying, it was hard to tell which one. Her little fist was clenched tightly around the boy’s wrist. This baby was much smaller and not sitting up but lying on his tummy, scowling at the camera like it had done him wrong. They both had eyes of gray steel.
“These are you and Katie!” I exclaimed. “Then that means the kids he was trying to get to were—“
“Don’t mean nothing,” Marty said.
“But—“
“Don’t mean nothing,” he repeated stridently. “He could have gotten that letter from someone else. Stolen it. Lifted off a dead inmate—“
I frowned. “Do you really think—“
“Don’t mean nothing,” Marty repeated. “Not now.” He took the letter and the photo out of my hands and before I could appeal, ripped them into tiny fragments the goat would have found delicious. But even then he wasn’t satisfied. He grabbed the lantern and fed each of the scraps to the flame.
“But what about Katie? Has she seen it? Did you tell her? Does she know—“
“She don’t need to know nothing about that. It’ll only cause her more hurt.” His voice dropped to a low growl. “I may be small, but I’m always gonna protect her, best I can, for as long as I can. Just like what you did with your brother.”
“Me?” I shook my head. “It’s not the same at all.”
“Don’t matter that you didn’t like him much. You knew that taking him to that Hole was the safest thing. You protected him. Long as you could. Otherwise, you’d have done the other thing. Stood out there. Let the fire get ya. Or just left him at his school. With strangers.”
He fell silent, letting me chew on that for a second.
“Family’s about what you do, not the stuff you say. Mr. David used to say that all the time. It’s what you do for the people you care about. To protect them, even if it ain’t always pretty or nice. Even when they hate you for it.” He hesitated, then continued in a calm, level voice. A killer’s voice. “If that convict comes back, Nester, I’m taking him down, no matter who he could have been. Too late for him to be anything but an intruder to me now.“
He pulled himself up and started for the barn door.
“I’m gonna get a sack of salt from the cellar. We can use one of them barrels with the lids.”
“Okay,” I heard myself say but I didn’t even look at him. Instead, I turned to finally say something directly to Nate’s ghost. But of course, just like in life, when I wanted him, he wasn’t there.
I stood up, ignoring the protest of my knees and back, grabbed the meat saw and began the work of cutting the goat’s carcass into two halves. The Nester Bartlett who had been president of the Robotics Club, 4.0 student, Harvard-bound—he was gone. Gone like Nate and my parents and the hope that the remaining members of our little Doomsday kids family would all survive to see the sun again. The goat’s sinewy body was as good an outlet for my rage and grief and pain as anything—and I attacked, wondering if, when the situation presented itself again, I could channel those feelings into my finger and pull a trigger.
