Ashes (Ashes Trilogy 1)

“How do you know so much?” Ellie demanded. “You can’t know.”

Tom looked suddenly tired. “I know enough. I’m an explosive ordnance disposal expert.”

“What’s that mean?” asked Ellie.

“It means,” Tom Eden said, “that I’m the guy they send out to make sure the bombs don’t go off.”

“Well then, you did a really sucky job, Tom,” said Ellie, and burst into tears.

23

“He’s wrong.” Ellie’s eyes were swollen and the tip of her nose was red, but the rest of her face was pinched and too white in the glare of Alex’s flashlight. The tent was warm enough, but Ellie couldn’t stop shivering, even with Mina curled alongside her. She bunched the sleeping bag under her chin. “He doesn’t know.”

Alex cast about for something more reassuring to say, unsure if her shakiness was only due to the aftereffects of a concussion. She ended up smoothing Ellie’s damp hair from her forehead. “He’s just guessing, Ellie.”

Privately, she had to admit that what Tom said made some sense, even if an EMP didn’t account for everything. Unless there was more than one, or maybe a lot of EMPs combined with something else—but with what?

“But what about those kids we saw? Could all those … those …”

“Electromagnetic pulses?”

“Yeah. Could a lot of them at the same time do that? Make you go crazy and eat people?”

“I don’t know, Ellie.”

Ellie’s eyes shone like twin high beams. “When you were asleep, Tom said it wouldn’t be safe to go back home right away, especially to any of the cities. He said that if this was really big, there wouldn’t be power or water, and no way to get food because nothing would work. People would be scared and maybe hurting each other.”

Alex opened her mouth to reply, but then came the sound of the tent being unzipped, and a moment later, Tom stuck his head in. “How we doing in here?” he asked.

“You’re wrong,” Ellie said, without a lot of heat.

“We were just talking about you,” Alex said.

“I knew my ears were burning.” Tom shouldered his way in. The tent was a two-man and a tight fit. Alex felt Tom at her back, and she could smell him, too: the fragrance of wood smoke and musk so potent it made her a little dizzy. “What’s up?” he asked.

“We were wondering…,” Alex began. When she turned to look over her shoulder, their faces were inches apart. His cinnamon-colored hair, thick and wavy, was mussed and his cheeks rosy, as if he’d just come in from a ski slope—and he smelled so good. Her pulse jumped at a powerful tug of attraction. “Ellie said you think we shouldn’t go back.”

Tom’s eyes flicked to Ellie then back. “We can talk about this in the morning. You know, after Ellie gets some rest.”

She got the message. “Sure.”

“Don’t go,” Ellie said. She put a hand on Alex’s arm. “I don’t want to go to sleep.”

Tom grinned. “No arguments, kiddo. We got to get an early start tomorrow. Mina will stay here, and we’ll be right outside, okay? We aren’t going anywhere, and we’ve got my Winchester, and I got a Mossberg for Alex here. We’ll be fine.”

“If we’ll be fine, how come you need guns?”

Tom looked so perplexed that Alex almost laughed. “Honestly, Ellie, everything will be okay,” she said. “The guns are for just in case.”

“Maybe I should have a gun.”

“I don’t think so. Guns are pretty heavy, and your hands are too little,” Alex said, relieved that this was true. “We’ll watch out for you.”

“Promise?”

“Pinky swear. If you’re ever in trouble, all you have to do is yell and we’ll hear you.”

“I don’t have a very big voice,” Ellie said.

“I know how to fix that.” She dipped a hand under her sweatshirt and fished out her silver whistle, warm from her body heat. “You blow on that and I bet you ten bucks they’ll hear it in the next state.”

Ellie held up her hair as Alex slipped the chain over the girl’s head. The girl cupped the whistle in her hands as carefully as a robin’s egg. “Who gave it to you?”

Swallowing was suddenly very, very hard. She felt Tom’s eyes on her. “My parents. I was a little younger than you. They gave it to me on my first camping trip.”

Ellie said, gravely, “You have very smart parents.”

“You know, Tom’s right. It’s pretty late,” Alex said. “Come on. I’ll tuck you in.”

24

Outside, by the fire, Tom said, “That was pretty good.”

Alex tried on a smile that kept slipping from her lips. “She’s just scared.” She paused. “Me, too.”

“Makes three of us,” Tom said, and took her hand. The act was so natural and so quiet, not a come-on at all. She didn’t flinch, although her heart did that little thump-bump-a-dump again. His hand was calloused, but his skin was warm and his grip was strong. It was weird how he was about her age but seemed older somehow. Maybe that happened when you went to war. “Cut yourself some slack,” he said. “Ellie would be dead if not for you.”

“I don’t know if you noticed, but you saved us,” she said.

“True. But I had a gun.”

“And we got lucky.”

“Half the battle. Like Stan and Earl.”

“Can you tell me what happened?”

He hesitated, then said, “I still don’t get it all. The … Zap happened, and Stan dropped dead. Just dropped.”

“You mean, like Ellie’s …?”

Tom was shaking his head. “I don’t think so, not like her grandfather. Stan was a healthy guy, in his forties, I think. He might have had a pacer or something else mechanical, but I doubt it. Earl had just turned sixty-five. I know because Jim talked about throwing his dad a big party when he got back from Afghanistan.”

“Did he bleed?”

“Jim? Yeah, but so did I. So did Earl.”

“How did Earl die?” But she thought she knew. “Was it Jim?”

Sighing, Tom gave her hand a squeeze, then let go. “Jim was okay at first, but then his headache came back, worse than before, and then his memory started to go. Like the second morning he didn’t know what a spoon was for. It only lasted a second, but it was really spooky, and then it wasn’t just the spoon, it was everything. Like his memory was full of holes.”