Ashes (Ashes Trilogy 1)

“What did you do?”

“Before or after the plane crashed in the football field?”

“After.”

“I nearly beat a kid to death with a textbook. It was either that or he was going to take my face off. There was this other girl in the group. She was still okay—not Changed—only she freaked out and took off for the playground where there were all these kids. Most of them hadn’t Changed. Some had, though, and they were going after the others.”

“Oh my God.” She didn’t even want to imagine that.

“Then these five football jocks spotted her. Plowed right into that playground and tore that girl apart, and after that, they started in on the little ones.” He paused again. “I still see it sometimes when I close my eyes. Hear it. The whole freaking mess.”

“What did you do?”

“Not what I thought I would,” he said. “I ran.”

They rode in silence for a while and then she asked, “How did you end up in Rule? Because of your grandfather?”

He shook his head. “My car wouldn’t start. Home was twenty-five miles away, and Merton’s a big town. After what I saw at the school, I figured it would be five hundred times worse there. All those people dead or getting killed or going crazy. No point.”

“But it was still home.”

“There was just me and my dad.” The shadows in Chris’s scent thickened, and Alex thought that his father was someone Chris didn’t like thinking about. “Now that we understand more—how old the people who dropped were—I know there wouldn’t have been any point. He was fifty.”

“But you couldn’t have known that then, and there have to be exceptions. Look at us.”

“We only prove the rule. As near as we can tell, the majority of normal people walking around are either really young or pushing sixty-five or seventy on up.”

“Oh.” She cast about for something to say. “Well, your father would want you to save yourself. He wouldn’t want you dead.”

The corner of his mouth lifted again. “You didn’t know my dad.”

She didn’t know what to say to that either. “How many of us are there?”

“In Rule? Well, we’ve got about five hundred people total. Out of those, sixty-three are Spared.”

“Sixty-three kids out of five hundred people?”

“That’s right. Only twenty-five kids are our age: twelve guys, thirteen girls.” He measured her with a look. “Fourteen, now.”

“Only twenty-five?”

“Uh-huh. Peter’s the oldest Spared; he’s twenty-four.” He hesitated. “He’s actually a pretty good guy once you get to know him.”

She’d reserve judgment on that. “How does anyone know we won’t change? Maybe it’s just a matter of time, like Peter said.” She thought about Deidre. “Have any of the younger kids Changed since the Zap?”

“Never quite gotten that far.”

She didn’t understand. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, we don’t let things get that far.” In the moonlight, his face was nothing more than a glimmer. “Why do you think we have the dogs?”

An early warning system, she realized: like canaries in a mine, the dogs must sense the change before it happened. Still, she couldn’t believe it. “You decide about a kid on the basis of what a dog thinks?”

“They haven’t been wrong yet.”

Meaning these people had experience. My God, had they locked the kids up and watched them change? Like an experiment, just to make sure? They must have, or else they wouldn’t have such faith in the dogs.

A wave of unreality washed over her, leaving her shaky and ill. The dogs finger kids, and then these people … what do they do? Kick the kids out of town? Kill them? She thought back to those three kids, the girl with her club and those two boys. Until that moment, she hadn’t dwelled on them much. She’d been too busy trying to keep Tom alive and then fending off a mob, and there really was no point, to borrow a phrase. What she’d done had been self-defense. She’d had no choice.

“We do what we have to in order to survive,” Chris said quietly. “When you’ve been here awhile, you’ll understand.”

The hell of it was: in a way, she already did.

44

The bodies of the three kids still lay where they’d fallen—where she’d killed them—in the parking lot of the convenience store. Which begged another interesting question: why weren’t the Changed lunch for run-of-the-mill scavengers? Scavengers had clearly visited. Ned was still dead, but headless now, and something else had wandered away with Ned’s left hand. But the Changed hadn’t been touched.

And someone else had been there.

The back door of the convenience store had been forced from the outside. In the office, there was only a pile of car mats and the reek of bourbon and infection—and nothing more.

Tom was gone.

PART FOUR: RULE

45

The pop of distant gunfire jolted Alex from yet another fitful night’s sleep. She registered the slash of morning sun in an already too-bright and very cold room, the soft bed, and the comforting, oh-so-normal aromas of sausage and eggs and fried potatoes and … yes … coffee. Yet what she felt was not hunger or gratitude but a horrible sinking sensation, like when you go to sleep hoping the world will change only to wake up and find that it hasn’t. Yes, she was safe and warm and fed and clean for the first time since leaving the ranger station, but Tom was gone and she had failed.

More shots. Not many. After three days—almost Thanksgiving now—she was getting used to the gunfire, which was sometimes more, sometimes less.

She pulled the pillow over her head to blot out the noise and light. She had nothing to be thankful for. She had failed. Tom would never have failed her. She should never have left him. God, this was so unfair. First her parents, then the monster and her life and school and friends, then Aunt Hannah, then Ellie and Mina, and now Tom …

She had to get out of here; she had to find Tom, and then Ellie, too. Gather supplies; she could get a pack, a map, a gun. But then what?

There was a quick rap on the door, more a formality than anything else. The knob turned and Jess poked her head into the room. “I thought I heard you moving around,” she said. “Time for you to come downstairs. Matt’s here to take you to meet the Reverend.”

“Why?” Three days, and her body still felt like one big bruise; her back ached, her throat was raw, and her hands were a quilt of healing cuts and scrapes. “It’s not like it changes anything.”