Ashes ashes the complete.., p.78
Ashes, Ashes: The Complete Series, page 78
“Where? On your legs? Your stomach?”
Katie lowered her eyes.
“No,” she said in a voice soft with embarrassment. “In my underwear. I—I was looking for a bit of clean cloth to try to wipe at it.” She looked around the filthy hoard. “Ain’t nothing fit to use in here. And I didn’t bring nothing that would work. Seeing as you carry all kinds of stuff, I thought maybe—”
“You’re telling me there’s blood in your underwear?” I repeated.
The girl blushed, swiped two more tears from her cheeks and nodded.
“Did you see a lesion? One of those red marks?”
The girl’s dusky skin went purple with her discomfort. “Well, no, but must be one, right? One of them sores that’s caused by radiation—”
“No. It might just be your period.”
Katie frowned. “My what?”
“Your period. Your monthly cycle or time of the month. The Crimson Wave. You know, Leak Week.”
The girl stared at me blankly.
“Oh come on Katie. You’re a farm girl!” I cried in exasperation. “Please tell me you know about the birds and the bees. The sex talk. We’ve just been talking about babies. You know where they come from right? About how boys and girls are different and the two of them have to—”
“I know about that,” she said quickly. “But what’s that got to do with the blood?”
In another time, I might have laughed. But one look in the girl’s earnest gray eyes and I exhaled a sigh of resignation. God's got jokes... and it was beginning to feel like they were all at my expense. I snatched up my backpack and dug toward the bottom where I’d stowed some clean strips of fabric in a baggie. I’d thought they’d come in useful if we needed to make a splint or as bandages, but apparently today at least, they’d have another use.
“Wad it up. Or tie it around yourself—”
“How?”
“I don’t know!” I cried. “It’s not anything I’ve had to deal with since SHTF. Figure something out. As for the rest, I’ll explain it on the way back to the cabin.”
Chapter 6
“It won’t be too much longer,” Nester said somberly. “Mr. Harper is dying.”
I nodded. “I guess that’s not exactly a news flash.”
Nester gave me the “you’re a cold-hearted bitch” but didn’t bother to say the words. He let me continue scribbling in my journal without asking me any questions about it.
“It shouldn’t be happening so fast.”
“How long do you think it should take for someone to die,” I said, laying aside the pencil and staring at him. “A month? A year?” I shook my head. “Maybe the only reason he survived this long was the hope of being here again. And now that he’s here—now that he’s seen his son and found out what happened to his daughter…” I lifted my shoulders, letting them express finality rather than say the words.
“You forget he’s got a wife. Liam’s mother might be alive. She might be at the Survivor’s Camp, waiting for them both—”
“You think he could last that long?” I quirked an eyebrow at Nester dubiously. I knew I sounded ungrateful and callous, but it’s not that. There just doesn’t seem to be much point in pretense in this new world.
Nester didn’t answer that question. Instead, he made a big show of arranging the pieces of his latest attempt at a working prosthetic foot on the long table.
“Amaranth seems to be better,” he said carefully. “The antibiotic seems to be working.”
I frowned into the pages of the journal.
“I don’t think she’s contagious anymore.”
I didn’t say anything.
“She says she wants to talk to you. About Rod—”
“Is there any left?” I demanded.
“Any what left?”
“Antibiotic. Is there any left?”
He sighed. “Not much.”
“Then we need to start making a plan to go south,” I said closing the journal. “As soon as Mr. Harper dies we should pack up and—”
“Amy!” Nester hissed, shaking his head at me in rebuke. “That sounds so…”
“I don’t care how it sounds!” I snapped. “We were lucky to find that supply of drugs and you can be damn sure we won’t be that lucky again. If anything else happens—if anyone else gets sick or anything— we’re screwed, Nester. Screwed. No. After Mr. Harper is gone, we pack what we can and we go—”
The front door opened and slammed closed with a shudder that vibrated the walls. Liam emerged from the little alcove, maneuvering into the room on one crutch, the metallic end digging small moons into the floor without its protective plastic cup. He held his father’s broken prosthetic leg in one hand. His mouth was open like he was about to say something until he saw us.
“What’s wrong?” he asked immediately.
“Nothing, man—” Nester began but I interrupted him.
“We were talking about when to leave,” I said, ignoring Nester’s sigh of irritation. “It should be soon.
Liam’s head wagged from side to side. “Dad says to wait. Until April. Until Spring.”
April? The image that populated my waking nightmares—of myself giving birth on the cabin’s couch—rose in my mind.
“No! I—I can’t wait until April. I—we won’t last until Spring!” My voice rose, edging on panic and the two boys frowned at me, blinking their confusion. “Don’t you get it?” I continued, getting my emotions under control with difficulty. “We’re starting to run out of things, Liam. If we wait until spring, we’ll have a thousand miles to walk and no food to take—”
“Eight hundred sixty one,” Nester interrupted. “It’s not a thousand miles. It’s eight hundred sixty-one—”
“Really, Nester?” I couldn’t keep the sarcasm out of my voice. “What difference does that make if we’re starving to death?”
“We might not have to walk,” Liam said. “The hearse—”
“Is out of gas,” I reminded him.
“But if we can find some more—”
“And if we can’t?” I sighed. “Look, I hope we can. But I told you what Katie and I found when we went to Kinder to look for Marty. Someone’s already been through here, scavenging. The tanks were all cut and drained. I’d much rather drive eight hundred sixty-one miles than walk it, believe me. But let’s be realistic: the odds of us finding enough gas to drive the whole way are infinitesimal. So figure we’re walking a whole lot more than riding. How long would that take us?” I turned to Nester, waiting for him to calculate and spit out an answer, but his battery must have died because he didn’t answer and wouldn’t even look at me. Instead, I put my own brain to work. “If we averaged around 15 miles a day, for nearly 900 miles—” I shot Nester a warning glance, letting him know the peril of interrupting me again. “Sixty-something days—”
“Longer,” Liam said quietly. “I can’t walk.”
“Eighty days, then,” I continued, ignoring the edge of self-pity in the words and pressing toward action. “Ninety. Whatever. Any way you slice it, it’s going to take months. Two or three or maybe even four if the weather is against us. Today is… I calculated quickly with the tally I’d started on the first page of my journal. December 12? Maybe the 14th? Mid-December. We’re already we’re out of rice. What do you think we’ll be eating if we wait until April?”
Liam’s eyes glittered and his jaw tightened. I saw the resemblance between him and his father and for a moment the little girl inside me, almost lowered her eyes to show respect. But just as quickly, the boy Liam returned. So did the determined, grown-up part of me.
“Dad wants us to wait—”
“Your dad didn’t plan for this many kids living here. He didn’t plan for the animals to all die so there’s nothing to hunt. And he didn’t plan for—” I stopped, biting my lip to keep from betraying myself. “He didn’t play for your mom to not be here, too.”
“Dad wants us to wait,” Liam repeated like that was the only answer to any of the logical points I made. “And besides, we can’t do anything until Amaranth is better. And until Marty comes back. And Dad is…” He abandoned the sentence and turned to Nester. “Look at this,” he stretched the prosthetic toward him. “The way it’s broken.”
Nester took the piece of metal from him and studied it carefully. “Yeah,” he said. “We’d need to solder it down a bit. Attach a cup for the stump—”
“I think it still might be a little long for me—”
Nester shook his head. “I’m not sure we can fix that with the tools we have. Titanium’s got a high melting point like almost 2000 degrees Kelvin. Not something we’re gonna hit with our little blow torch.”
“But maybe in the stove?” Liam asked.
Nester’s thin brown face split into a wide grin. “Maybe. Cranked on high…” he nodded. “Yeah, man. We can give it a try…” He lifted an eyebrow. “You okay with this? It’s got to feel a little weird, wearing your father’s leg—”
“I…I don’t think he’ll be wearing it anymore, Nester,” Liam said softly, turning away from us. “Help me measure.”
“So that’s it?” I demanded. “End of discussion without a decision?”
“He’s right, Amy. We can’t even think about this until Amaranth is better and we find Marty,” Nester said without looking at me. “And if we can figure out a working prosthetic it just makes everything easier, right?”
“But Amaranth is better. And it’s been almost a week. Marty could be on the way to the Survivor’s Camp without us by now or…” I didn’t want to say the other possibility, that he’d gotten caught in the elements and died in the last snow storm. “If we’re going to leave after Liam’s father dies, then we should start planning now. Looking for gas in the town, and figuring out what we’re going to carry and—”
“Why don’t you go talk to Amaranth,” Liam interrupted me without turning his head in my direction. His voice held an edge of nastiness–of challenge—that I hadn’t heard in a while, not since the bad old days of The Hole. “See if you think she’s ready to travel.”
And then they went to work like I wasn’t even there.
“You think I don’t want to talk to Amaranth? You’re wrong,” I said huffily. “I’ll go talk to Amaranth. But first—”
“You have to go to the outhouse,” Nester finished, but he didn’t look at me when he said it, and I couldn’t tell what he suspected.
“No,” I lied. “I’ve got to go upstairs and… do something.”
I made a big show of stuffing the journal back into my backpack and zipping it tightly before sliding it onto my shoulders. The boys completely ignored me.
I stomped up the stairs to my room and closed the door, my heart thumping and my bladder screaming, but I made myself stand there, counting off a full minute, determined to play the part I’d created for myself, even though I knew neither Nester or Liam cared.
It’s just Amaranth, I told myself, glancing at myself in the scarred and filmy bit of mirror. Katie had kept my secret—she was too preoccupied with Marty’s absence to give me a way just yet—but it seemed to me my face looked fuller.
“Fat. You’re fat as a little piggy, Amy!“ My mother chided, laughing. “A summer off and you’re so round they will have to roll you through the doors of the high school!”
“I didn’t take the summer ‘off,’ Mom. I broke my foot in cheering camp when that stupid girl dropped me—”
Mom laughed in the way she always did when she provoked me but didn’t really want to fight. “I know, my little piggy. Just teasing you. But you know how those other girls are. The ones on you cheer with. You girls are vicious to each other. The boys, they don’t care, but the girls?” She shook her head. “They notice everything.” And she went on with whatever she’d been doing before.
But I sulked to my room and closed the door. The full-length mirror hanging there showed me a girl who did look rounder than she had when school let out in June. My cheeks seemed to swallow my eyes and my butt looked fluffy and wide. Even my boobs were bigger than they had been. I bent and unstrapped the boot to study my legs: the healthy one was browner than the one that had been shielded from the sun by the walking boot I’d been wearing for the past six weeks. My ankles looked mismatched and ugly.
It was all ugly. Fat and ugly--and the summer was more than half over. The first day of cheer practice was two weeks away. The first day of high school was another week after that. I could almost see Kara and Leeza’s faces, hear them whispering behind my back.
“Girl, have you seen Yamamoto? She's gone totes ‘obeast!’”
“She won’t be the flier anymore! Who wants to toss that up in the air and have to catch it?”
“Who can toss that up in the air and catch it!” And then they’d bray like hyenas at my expense.
“No,” I told my reflection. “Just… no.” I kicked the boot aside. The doctor had said to give it another week, but she didn’t have to report to practice in perfect condition in two weeks.
“Dinner!” Mom called from the kitchen.
I stared at myself for another long moment. My stomach gurgled at the thought of the delicious teriyaki chicken, made with my Grandma’s recipe and I could almost imagine the tender, juicy meat in my mouth. But I opened the door and called,
“Not hungry!” and slammed it shut before I could hear her reply.
Boys don’t care, but girls notice everything, Mom repeated in my brain, adding to all the other feelings I had about Amaranth. She’d take one look at me and know. And then the others would know and—
I reached for the cedar chest again, pulling out Lilly’s jeans, hoping against hope that I could get them on again.
But this time it was worse: I got them over my hips but not only could I not button the top button, I couldn’t even zip the zipper.
“Dammit,” I muttered. I wished I hadn’t taken Liam’s challenge, that I’d swallowed back my resentment and put off this encounter for another few days. But now that I’d said I’d go to the barn and talk to her, I was stuck.
I slipped off the jeans and threw them back into the chest, slipping the mom jeans back on. My stomach didn’t look much bigger yet, but the fit of the clothes didn’t lie. Before I slammed the chest closed I pulled out a thick sweater in an ugly oatmeal color that did nothing for my skin tone. But it was warm and baggy and loose and when I took another quick look in the mirror, the garment was so big that I looked tiny in it.
Amaranth. The last real conversation I’d had with her cued up in my mind.
“This is your last warning,” I leaned close to her and hissed the words. “If we catch you drunk again—”
“What?” she lifted her face at me, her green eyes glittering with Wicked Witch malevolence. “What are you going to do?”
“We’re going to ask you to leave. To go somewhere else—”
“You can’t.” She blinked at me, an edge of the bravado of the gin still in her voice. “Liam would never let you—”
“Liam isn’t in any shape to make any decisions right now,” I reminded her. “It’s me and Nester—”
“Nester wouldn’t let you, either. He’s not going to let you just toss me into the snow, Amy! Not everything we’ve been through together—”
“He will. If I tell him to, he will.”
Amaranth laughed. “You really think it’s like that? That he’ll just do what you want him to because you want him to?”
I didn’t even blink. I’d seen the way Nester looked at me and I knew the power of the longing in his eyes. “Yes,” I said simply and I stared at her until she lowered her eyes.
“Okay,” she said at last and this time when she met my gaze there was a different look there: a kind of resolve I hadn’t expected. “I get it. And I know how to play that game, too, Amy.”
Not too long after that she and Nester had come in together and the energy between them was off. Something had happened, but what, I wasn’t sure. Nester wasn’t telling and shortly after that, Amaranth had struck even harder. She’d taken Rod… and gone.
The thick wool of the sweater prickled on my skin and the press of my bladder announcing that it wouldn’t wait much longer pushed me to move. I brushed a stray hair behind my ears, picked up my gun and my gear and left the room.
“Hey!” Jax stank like old manure and armpit, but gave me a wide smile like we were old friends and opened the barn door wide.
I felt stupid for knocking like that—I mean, it’s a barn not a house. But my mother taught me manners and the remnants of courtesy still surprised me by showing up at the weirdest times.
“Put your mask on,” he reminded me, glancing at the corner where Liam and Katie had made Mr. Harper as comfortable as they could. “Just in case.”
I nodded, fitting the dirty paper filter over my ears, wondering, as I always did if it was really doing me any good.
“Good timing,” Jax said. “She’s complaining about me, so I thought I’d see about a bath—”
“Yeah, good idea,” I muttered. “You reek.”
He laughed good-naturedly. “That’s what she said—”
“Then go,” I said impatiently.
Jax hesitated long enough for me to look up at him.
I guess once I would have thought he was cute: he had a mane of fluffy dishwater blonde hair, high cheekbones and a little dimple in his chin when he smiled. But it was the smile that ruined it. He came across as goofy, boyish and, for all his muscles, weak.
“What?” I asked. “You can use the warm water on the stove,” I jerked my head toward the cabin. “Just draw a few buckets from the well so you can replace them immediately. We always boil the water before using it. A precaution against—”
“Fallout,” Jax said, his big blocky head bobbing in time with the words. “Liam explained it.”
“Okay.”
We stared at each other. I was waiting for him to go. I have no idea what he was waiting for.
“Well…I guess I should leave you girls alone to talk,” he said at last, laughing again and jumping my irritation another few spikes up the ladder.
