Ashes (Ashes Trilogy 1)

God, just like animals. She shuddered at the thought. And what was with that stink? It smelled like … she didn’t know … roadkill, yeah, but it was a really old smell, too. No, old wasn’t the right word either.

The kids smelled … wild. They were wild. They were like zombies—only alive instead of coming back to life. Or maybe they had died and then …? No, no, that couldn’t be right. Could it? God, she didn’t know. All she knew was their electronics had fried and so had their brains. The brain-zap hit them all: the animals and these kids and her and Ellie. Until now, she’d thought that she was the only one who’d changed—a stupid assumption, but she just hadn’t had anything to go on. Hell, she’d never stopped to consider that the zap might cover a big area: not just the mountain but the valley, too. The mountain was, what, five miles back? So, if the zap was a circle, say, with a radius of five miles, square that and times pi and …

Oh my God. Her breath caught. Eighty square miles? The Waucamaw was huge, almost four hundred square miles. If she was right, that zap hit a fifth of the wilderness—a lot of land. And how many people? This far north, the fall colors were past peak by a good week, which meant that tons of tourists already had come and gone.

And what was with those kids? They’d changed in a way that was different from her.

Or maybe not. She remembered how Ponytail Blonde had tested the air. What if their sense of smell sharpened, too? What if that’s the first step?

Her restless mind strayed back to those gunshots. For the first time, she considered that maybe the question wasn’t what those guys had been shooting at, but who.

Was that going to happen to her? God, she’d put a bullet in her head first. But what if she didn’t notice until it was too late? Worse, what if she didn’t want to stop the change? What if she didn’t care?

“Alex?” Ellie’s voice floated out of the dark. “Is what happened to those kids going to happen to us?”

Hearing her thoughts come out of Ellie’s mouth thoroughly creeped her out. “No,” Alex said automatically. “It’s been too long. It would’ve happened already.”

Liar. The voice was small, only an inner whisper misting through her mind. You don’t know anything for sure. You’ve changed, and you’re still changing. You’re smelling things—and you’re smelling meanings. That zap was only this morning, and look how far you’ve come since then. Look how fast those kids changed. Maybe what happened to them hasn’t caught up to you yet.

Go away, you. She couldn’t worry about this now. She didn’t want to worry about it ever. All she wanted was to close her eyes and not dream at all; to wake up in her own bed and see that this was all a really bad nightmare or something.

“Come on,” she said, “go to sleep. We have a long day ahead of us tomorrow.”

“But I’m scared to go to sleep,” Ellie said. “What if I don’t wake up like me?”

“We’ll be okay.”

“How do you know? Maybe we’re going to die.”

“No, we’re not. Not today.” It was another automatic response, a little bit of the gallows humor—or reality—she’d adopted over the past two years. “And not tomorrow either.”

A pause. “I’m sorry about Mina. She wouldn’t leave. I couldn’t get her to come.”

“You did the best you could,” Alex said, though she doubted this was the case. The kid hated that dog.

“Do you think she’ll be okay?”

“I don’t know, Ellie. She seems like a pretty smart dog.”

“Maybe she’ll go wild.”

“Maybe. I don’t know how fast dogs go wild.” If they’re starving, maybe very fast. But that was her voice now, not this other whisper.

“Grandpa said there are lots of wild dogs in the Waucamaw already. He says that people leave them here because they think they’re doing the dogs some big favor by setting them free, only a lot starve and the ones who don’t go wild.”

“I don’t think worrying about Mina will help.”

“Oh.” Silence. “I wish I could do it all over again.”

“Do what?”

“Everything. I wish I had been nicer to Grandpa,” Ellie whispered miserably. “I wish I’d been nicer to Mina. Maybe if I’d been better, my mommy wouldn’t have gone away.”

She wasn’t exactly sure what to say. “Your grandpa said your mom went away when you were really little. It couldn’t have been anything you did. You were just a baby.”

“Maybe. Daddy had some pictures, but he didn’t like looking at them because they made him sad.” Ellie was quiet a moment. “I don’t even remember what Daddy looks like anymore. He’s all blurry. He made me mad, too.”

“How come?”

“Because he went away when I told him not to. He said he had to because it was his job.”

Alex knew what this was like. “Sometimes when you’re sad, it’s easier to be angry.”

“Do you get mad at your parents?” asked Ellie.

Alex’s throat balled. “All the time,” she said.

Ellie fell asleep not long after, but tired as she was, Alex couldn’t relax. Her mind churned, and she was restless, jumpy, her legs a little herky-jerky. The feeling reminded her of the time Barrett tried a med that was supposed to make her not puke during chemo—Reglan, was it? She couldn’t remember; she’d been through enough drugs over the past couple of years to keep a small army of pharmacists in business. The problem with meds was that even the ones that were supposed to take care of side effects had side effects. Like the way Reglan made her all twitchy, with a horrible, total-body sensation of ants swarming over her skin. So she’d been a total spaz and nauseous, which sucked.

The distant cry of a coyote came then, a sound like the squeal of a rusty hinge. Maybe she should keep watch. There were animals, after all, and those two brain-zapped cannibal kids. Who knew what—who—they might have in mind for dessert. Yeah, maybe a quick turn around their camp. Better than lying here, ready to jump out of her skin. Reaching for her Glock, which she’d taken off along with her fanny pack before bedding down, she winced at the sharp, harsh crackle of leaves, but Ellie didn’t stir.

She cradled the gun. Its solidity was reassuring, and so was its scent: gun oil, the faint metallic char of burnt powder. The holster smelled like comfortable shoes mingling with just the tiniest whisper of sweat—a scent that was not hers; she knew that.