Ashes ashes the complete.., p.86
Ashes, Ashes: The Complete Series, page 86
Chapter 12
“Oh God. You’re just girls. Just… girls,” she whispered in horror as she tottered into the circle of the torch’s light closer to us, her arms stretched out like she wanted to embrace us. “I—I was expecting more men. Like the ones who broke in. Stole all the food we had left…” she shuddered, her legs folding beneath her until she rested in a heap of clothing on the dirty carpet. “The ones who killed my husband and son—” she nodded toward the two men’s bodies. “Oh…you poor girls. You poor, poor girls…”
I peered at the old woman in the dim torch light, but I didn’t see another weapon. It might have been hidden in the folds of the blanket, but my intuition told me she was bluffing—that she had no way of holding us there other than her words.
“Yes. You should go. All I ask is that you finish it. Finish me before you go,” she closed her eyes. “Do it quickly and do it now. Here. I want to be with my family.”
“Wait,” Amaranth frowned like her brain was as slow as the rest of her. “Are you saying you want us to kill you?”
The woman’s frazzled gray head bounced once in the affirmative. “You have the gun. Do it. Please—”
“Why don’t you do it yourself?” I demanded.
A glint of defiance shone in the woman’s dull eyes and then faded.
“Because…” her voice trembled. “I’m a coward. I—I couldn’t do it…I tried. I tried over and over…but I couldn’t do it…” Those imploring eyes pinioned us again and she stretched skeletal claws at us. “Please!” she cried. “Please—”
“Okay, okay. I’ll kill you,” I said reassuringly. “But first, who are you? What happened here? And is there any food left anywhere?”
“I live here,” the woman answered. “Or I used to. This was our home. Our dream home until…” her eyes shifted to the room where those bodies sat in a neat line.
“Until?”
“Until those men came. About a month ago.”
“Men?”
“Mostly. A bunch of them. Some kind of gang in a weird blue uniform,” she finished weakly. “We–we’d fortified the doors, but—but they smashed them in. My family—my son and his wife, my daughter and her husband—and their children hid back there, in the utility room. We hoped they’d just take the food and go, but…”
“They didn’t,” Amaranth finished.
The woman shook her head. “No… no, they didn’t. When we heard them coming down the stairs, my son-in-law Trent—he had been a Marine—he took out his gun. ‘I’ll draw them away,’ he said, even though my daughter begged him to sit still and be quiet. But he said he couldn’t just sit there. He had to try…and my husband and son went with him. They left us with that gun. The one in your hand.”
She stopped talking. Her eyes closed heavily like she was going to sleep and realized how close to death she already was.
“Ma’am?” Amaranth sank to her knees. “Ma’am? Are you awake? Can you finish the story?”
“They killed them,” the woman muttered. “They killed James and Trent and when we heard the gun shots and the sounds of those animals as they attacked the door to come for the rest of us—that’s when my daughter said it. She said it… and she was brave. So much braver than I will ever be…”
Her voice broke and she hung her head, gasping as her shoulders shook.
“Please just kill me,” she moaned rocking herself back and forth. “Please…just kill me…I’m an embarrassment to their courage. I should have died long, long ago…”
“I told you, I’ll do it. But I don’t understand,” I said, squatting down beside her. “What did your daughter say?”
“That she wasn’t going to let them take her or her children,” the woman sobbed. “That she wasn’t going to die like that. So she—so she grabbed the gun off the floor and shot the kids first and then before I could stop her, she shot herself. I should have—I should have—but I didn’t. I couldn’t. I couldn’t…” She shuddered. “When those bandits came down the stairs I was covered in their blood. My daughter’s and those sweet grandbabies… and I just lay still and…”
“And they thought you were dead, too,” Amaranth finished softly.
“Yes,” she said dully. “And I am dead. They left nothing. Not a crumb of food, not even a grain of rice. I—I might have gone out, gone in search of something to eat, but…” She raised pleading eyes to my face again. “I’m a coward. I was too scared. Too scared to go out there and too scared to stay in here and…” she closed her eyes. “What happened to our lives? What did we ever do… to deserve this…?”
It was a good question, a question I’d asked myself a thousand times since we’d seen that flare of light and the mushroom cloud light the sky. Is this our future? A slow death from starvation, slowly growing weaker and weaker until we just…
“Whoever did this is long gone,” Amaranth said quietly.
“Yeah,” I stood up slowly, my hand straying to my belly again before I remembered myself. Amaranth didn’t notice this time but I turned away just in case. “That’s good and bad.”
“I get how it’s good. It means they’re long gone,” Amaranth said. “But bad? How is it bad?”
“She says this happened a month ago. A month ago, starving bands of people looted this whole area. That means we’re not likely to find much more gas or any more food,” I explained. “I’m not sure there’s much point in looking around the house—”
“But we will. If only for more clothes,” Amaranth said quietly.
“Please…” the woman moaned through her cracked lips. “Please… do it now. Put me with the others… and I can be at peace.”
The pistol was in my hand. I stared at it and then into the woman’s dull brown eyes. She was waiting for me, looking up at me with a trusting expression on her withered face. I imagined her daughter, looking into the eyes of those kids—her own children—and deciding that death was better than life.
You think it’s so easy—to just snuff someone out?
Nester screamed the words in my face, his frustration boiling onto me while I leaned toward him, hands balled into fists, calling him a “screw up” without ever saying the words. He was talking about the convict—the man we’d found half-dead, hiding in the barn during that first heavy snowfall at the Mountain Place.
“Who have you killed like that, up close and personal where you look into their eyes?” he demanded. “Who?”
“No one, but—”
“Then stop yelling at me!” he shouted and stalked away from me, grumbling under his breath. I heard an occasional phrase always being the one and sick of dealing with this bullshit like he was venting to his imaginary friend.
Desperation and hopelessness overwhelmed me as the gun trembled in my hand.
“Amy?” Amaranth stretched out her hand for the pistol. “What’s the matter? Aren’t you going to do it? Kill her? I thought you lived for shit like this, but if you won’t, I will.”
“Right,” I muttered. “Suddenly you’re a killer. When did that happen?”
“It happened on the road. When I realized there are worse things than death. When I watched Rod suffer and I knew I should have killed him, but I didn’t. He begged me to do it. Said…” her voice shattered a little but she mastered it. “Said he wanted me to. But I—I didn’t. I couldn’t and… and it got so bad, Amy. He was so brave. But it got so bad…”
“Well at least he had you.” The words were a sledgehammer and I watched them do their work. Then I pressed the gun into Amaranth’s hands and turned away before she could see how close I was to bursting into tears at the thought of Rod suffering, at the reminder that he’d died in her arms, not mine. “You do it. I’ll see what I can find upstairs and then we need to get out of here. The others will be wondering what happened to us.”
And then I practically ran from her.
My head was spinning as I hurried through the house, finding the staircase to the upper floors. I barely remember rummaging through drawers and selecting a few items that we might be able to use.
In one of the rooms I found a scrap of blue baby blanket. As I bent to take it the sharp report of the bullet echoed through the house and I sank to my knees and cried.
“Are you all right?” Jax had pounded up the house’s long drive by the time we emerged. He was panting and shaking and with his face wet with either sweat or tears. It struck me that he had lost some of confidence and strength he’d had. Or maybe he’d never had it. Maybe that was all in my head.
“We heard a shot,” Nester breathed behind him.
“That was me,” Amaranth said quietly. “We found a gun.”
“Anything else? Any food?”
I opened my mouth but nothing came out, so I just shook my head.
“What about shelter? It’s a nice house, mostly intact. The others…” he shook his head, letting us know without saying a word that what they’d found in the other houses was as bad as what we had. I shuddered, imagining the havoc the bandits the old lady had described must have left in the wake. “Think it would be okay if we—?”
“No!” I didn’t mean to shout, but the word landed high and shrill.
“She’s right,” Amaranth had to stop to cough. “It’s full of dead people. A whole family. We can’t stay there.” She paused before adding hopefully. “Did you guys find anything?”
The boys shook their heads.
“Dead people,” Nester wiped his face. “Liam, too. Same with Marty and Katie. Maybe we can stop again in a bit. Try another neighborhood—”
“No!” I cried again and this time tears bubbled out of me and I knew I was about two seconds from a monster melt-down in the same shade as the one I’d had on the bug-out bus.
Look at us. We’re starving and we’ve got so many miles to go. There’s still no one to help us… and I don’t know if I would trust anyone who offered anymore. It’s hopeless. It’s—
The nauseous feeling twisted my stomach so suddenly I barely had time to lurch to the side of the road. I hadn’t eaten in so long that all that came us was a little water mixed with yellowy stomach slime. It hurt as it came up, badly enough for me to lose the others' voices to my own discomfort.
“Oh my God! Amy? Are you okay?” Nester’s silent treatment came to a sudden end and he was next to me, his hand on my back.
“She–killed them,” I heard myself murmur. “Killed…”
“Who?” The voice said. “What is she talking about?” The speaker seemed to be talking to other people and the flurry of movement around me made me fight my eyes until they opened.
“There was a woman in there who shot her own kids,” Amaranth answered. “Rather than let the bad guys get them—”
I shot back to consciousness at the sound of her voice and tried to sit up and couldn’t. For second, I was confounded—I mean sometimes, when the anxiety got the better of me, I’d lock the door to my room and do sit-ups until my stomach burned with pain— but now it was like something was sitting on my chest.
A hand behind me gave me a gentle assist—Liam, I realized— and when I reached up I caught another one—Nester. They stared at me, searching for the weakness. I touched myself, relieved to find the heavy pouch of the backpack still strapped across my chest.
“What happened?” Nester met my eyes for the first time since the incident in the barn, but just as quickly he turned to Jax. “Is this the plague? Do you think she’s contagious?’
I opened my mouth, preparing words that would send him reeling away from me, but Amaranth interrupted everyone.
“She’s not contagious,” she said dismissively. “Just pregnant.”
The shock in their faces would have been funny, if I’d ever had any kind of sense of humor. And the silence, as all their heads whipped toward me. You could see the boys thinking, trying to decide the right thing to say and rejecting first one phrase and then the other, while they stared at me with their mouths half-open. And Katie, glaring at Amaranth with a fresh dislike for ruining her chance to “out” my secret.
And then, a moment later, their silence got too much. I could read the way I knew I’d shifted in their thoughts. So before any of them found words, I gathered a few of my own.
“Can we please just go? We’ve got a little more gas, but there’s nothing else here for us. I need to get to Alabama because I am not having this kid on some dirty road.” I shoved the map we’d found into Nester’s hands. “It looks like if we can by-pass most of the city of Huntington altogether. I calculate 30 miles or so until the Kentucky state line. It’s time to leave West Virginia behind us.”
Nester took the map and nodded once, looking into my eyes again right when a stupid tear crested over my lids and spilled down my face.
“Then, let’s go,” I said again and when I reached the ATV, I slipped my backpack from my back to my front and hopped on before Liam could. “I’m driving this time,” I muttered. “Hang on.”
We drove. The streets of the ritzy neighborhood gave way to homes of far less grandeur and then to the wide commercial strips of suburban shopping centers. Then the landscape changed again and we were skimming over the narrower streets of a historic downtown, tree-lined, gentrified and lovely. Or it was once. Now it was like us: ragged and hopeless, silent and busted up. We roared along unhindered, moving parallel to the gray stripe of a river.
I kept turning my head, expecting resistance, expecting the bandits the old woman had told us about. But of course, they were long gone. The streets were empty except for trash and broken glass and the snow that bounced against the sky and made my eyes ache.
I wished for my sunglasses—the cool designer pair that I’d been willing to spend all my birthday money on. The ones I loved. The ones my mother hated.
“Very foolish, Amy. Very foolish,” I could hear my mother saying in my head. “You will need to make a lot of money and marry well, with these habits.” She raised her eyebrows. “Why didn’t you get that boy to buy them for you? The rich one who’s over here all the time. Then you can have your glasses and keep your money—”
“Amy!” Liam’s voice rose over the engine, loud in my ear. He pointed.
Nester had pulled up beside me and was gesturing, demanding that I follow as he peeled away from the road, following the markers for the highway. We dodged abandoned cars, but not nearly as many as we had leaving our home in Washington, DC. The people here hadn’t been fleeing by car, and the traffic was comparatively sparse. But here, too, was the same hopeless emptiness, like we were the only eight people left alive in the world.
We hadn’t been driving long when we saw the big green sign, announcing the miles ahead in glowing white letters. “Louisville, Kentucky, 166 miles.”
Behind me, Liam stiffened.
“Can I ask you something?” he shouted over the engine.
I ignored him, but he kept talking.
“Why did you leave that woman alive? The leader. Back at the Mountain Place?”
I turned slightly.
“She was a friend. Once.”
His arms tightened around me.
“Mrs. Standish was my friend once,” he said, his breath a hot puff in my ear. “And not killing her was one of the worst mistakes I ever made.”
Chapter 13
“That’s it,” Jax silenced the engine’s screaming and swung off the snowmobile. “There’s just not enough snow now to keep this thing moving.” He inspected the treads and showed us his fingers. They were coated with rich auburn mud dusted lightly with snow. “It didn’t snow as much here.”
“But it’s just as cold,” Marty muttered through chattering teeth.
“The ATVs will still work,” Katie pointed out.
“But there’s only two of them and there are eight of us,” her brother concluded as though there were only the two of them in the conversation.
“Seems pretty simple,” Liam eased off the seat behind me, holding tight to the vehicle as he rubbed his legs back to life. “We load the gear onto the ATVs. A couple of us can ride while the rest walk. It’ll be slow,” he continued, cutting his eyes at me like I was the weak link. “But I think that’s a better plan than abandoning them.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “Amaranth can barely breathe and you can barely walk, so you two will be doing most of the driving.”
Amaranth swallowed back a cough and flushed red while Liam glared at me like he wanted to punch me but I ignored them both and started walking.
Jax was right, the terrain was changing. The rugged mountains that had dipped and risen as steeply as any staircase had given way to rolling hills. In the spring and summer, they were probably scenic, green and beautiful, but they greeted us in shades of sullen gray and wearing thin coatings of ice. The air felt cold and damp and raw in a way that was almost worse than when snowflakes dusted our shoulders.
I heard footsteps behind me and saw Nester’s lanky frame out of the corner of my eye, the map folded in his fist.
“The last sign we saw said we were near Lexington.”
He didn’t reply. I took it as agreement.
“Are we keeping to the road? Are we going to try to go into the city? Try to find some food?”
The muscles in his jaw worked making the fine dusting of hair covering his cheek quiver. With a little man-scaping, the fuzz might have suited him. But running wild along his cheeks like it was, I almost understood what Coach Sawyer had meant. If I hadn’t known him to be utterly harmless, I might have thought—
“Why are you asking me?”
“Duh, because you’re holding the map.”
He handed me the map without a word and focused his eyes on the bank horizon.
“Okay,” I muttered. “No need to get pissy about it—”
“No need to get pissy? No need to get pissy?” Instead of rising with his emotion, Nester’s voice sank to an angry baritone. “Look who’s talking about being pissy! For such a tiny girl, you go out of your way to insult and bully everyone here—”
