Shadows (Ashes Trilogy 2)

Which wasn’t strictly true. Not everything they salvaged ended up in Rule, but only Peter knew the reasons why. The equation was deceptively simple: supplies equaled cooperation. Yet it was a complex and delicate calculus that governed their survival. He didn’t care how the outlying groups north and west of Rule decided whose time was up; that was their business. Hold a lottery, do eeny-meeny-miney-mo, whatever. Just so long as someone drew that short straw and got booted out to face . . . well, the same thing that preyed on anyone Rule Banned and sent into the Zone. Everyone knew the Changed were out there, of course. Most just didn’t understand why they stayed.

To his mind, what he’d negotiated with the outliers was a one-hand-washes-the-other kind of thing. Peter wasn’t a bad guy, but a bargain was a bargain and you couldn’t make exceptions. Open the door just a little bit, let someone bend the rules, and the other groups got wind? Bring down the whole system, and then Rule was dead.

“I know it’s harsh,” he said to Tyler. “But no one said the end of the world would be easy. There’s nobody going to save us but us.”

“I guess.” Tyler was quiet a moment, then changed the subject. “Do you believe the stories? About the military getting bounty hunters to round up Spared?”

“I don’t know what to believe,” he said, but that was a lie, too. Crack a rumor and often as not there was a pearl of truth. That the military had a starring role wasn’t much of a surprise either. If only a third of the rumors were true, Rule was especially vulnerable. With sixty some odd kids, there just were too many Spared concentrated in too small an area. They had the Zone, but if the military really was involved, they had hardware that could reduce Rule to rubble. Might be time to break up the settlement, figure out safe havens where they could hide the younger kids if—

Beneath him, he felt Fable lurch in a quick, clattering stutter step. At the same moment, Tyler yelped and pitched forward, one foot still hooked in a stirrup, as his horse crashed to the ice. Lunging, Peter tried a grab, but then Fable’s legs gave, cut out from under. The mare came down very hard and with so much force that Peter heard the crack, a sound like a tree limb snapped over one knee.

Fable let go of a high, bawling scream.

A split second later, Peter was airborne.

11

Peter had no time to think, much less react. White rushed for his face, and then he smacked hard against the ice, his vision cutting out for a split second like a dropped call from a cell. There was a gap, like a sudden gasp in time, before he faded back, the feeling in his arms and legs coming in shocks and jabs, as if something with spikes and claws was scrambling over his skin. Someone was screaming his name, but he couldn’t answer. Every breath was a struggle. His own horse was still shrieking, and oh God, the noise coming out of Fable’s mouth hurt like nails hammered into his skull.

“Fable,” he croaked, the mare’s name riding on nothing more than a wheeze. Where was she? Rolling onto his left arm, he craned to look back up the hill, and that was when his heart turned over in his chest.

Bleating with terror and pain, Fable sprawled, thrashing, three good hooves pedaling air. But her right foreleg . . . Oh girl. A surge of pity and grief flooded into Peter’s chest. What he saw was a ruin: just a shattered stalk of bloody bone. Blood jetted from the severed artery to the ice, where it seeped in thick rivulets, flowing into ruts and dyeing the road a bright ruby-red. Fable was already dead. The poor thing just didn’t know it ye—

To his left, a tiny white geyser spurted from the snow at the very periphery of his vision. Confused, he had just enough time to think: Animal? A split second later, he caught a singular, distinctive snap followed by a whooshing HAAAAHHH.

And then Peter knew exactly what was going on, because sound is slow compared to a high-velocity bullet.

“Peter!” It was Weller, somewhere behind and up the hill. “Shooters! Move, move!”

Rolling, his body still screaming, Peter planted his hands and feet. Tyler—Tyler was thrown; so where is the kid, where is he? Peter threw a wild look over his left shoulder and spotted the boy’s horse perhaps twenty yards further on. A single glance was enough. The animal was still and very dead, its neck twisted so far around that the horse’s bulging eyes stared up the hill and right into his. Tyler was nowhere in sight.

Snow exploded to his right. Ice spray, sharp as broken glass, nipped his cheeks. More kerrr-SNAPs now and then yawning sighs as bullets streaked past. Another jump of snow and then a snap followed by a HAAAAHHH. He eyed the angle where bullet met snow and then knew where the shooters were.

On my left, up high, shooting down. But why am I not dead? I should be.

“Peter!” Weller, again, alongside the third wagon and still, somehow, astride his dancing roan. Men spilled from their horses amidst a confused gabble of barking dogs and the staccato stamp of horse hooves. “Peter, I’m coming for—”

“No, stay where you are!” Peter gestured in a frantic semaphore. “They’re on the left, up the hill! Get everyone behind the wagons!”

Snap—and then a nearly instantaneous, almost womanly shriek from a horse pulling the first, and closest, wagon. A fraction of a second later, the animal dropped, dead in its traces before it hit the ice. The animal’s weight dragged on the far horse, which stumbled as the driver tried, frantically, to adjust.

That was when Peter saw the barbed wire, stretched across the road at precisely the right height.

Ambush. But how did they know? I didn’t decide to come this way until five hours ago, when I sent the runner, Lang, ahead.

Braying, the horse tried backing away even as the wire tore its flesh. Another snap. The driver flung out his arms in a cartoonish gesture of surprise and crumpled as the horse finally panicked and reared, coming down with a clash of hooves that burst the driver’s skull like a cantaloupe. There was a series of loud cracks, like brittle bones, as the horse shafts disintegrated. And then the wagon was thundering over the ice in a shower of sparks: a thousand pounds of squalling metal and rumbling wood coming right at him.

Peter sprang left. He felt the tug and suck of air at his neck as the wagon screamed by. Thudding to the road, he swarmed over the rutted ice. Have to move, have to move, have to move, move, move! He scuttled up Dead Man’s Alley on hands and knees, his boots slip-sliding on ice and horse blood.

Fable was still alive, but her legs had ceased their frantic run on air. Her one visible eye rolled, trying to keep him in sight. This close, he smelled her rank sweat and the aluminum tang of her blood. Her leg was shredded, the skin hanging in bloody ribbons where the bone had ripped through. As he dropped into the sheltering hollow along her belly, his horse moaned and tried to roll to her feet.